by Ed West
But the Romans rarely had any problem with foreign religions, and simply co-opted alien gods and pasted them onto their own, a system that worked surprisingly well until they came across a group in Judea who took the progression to its next logical step by proclaiming that there was just one god. These beliefs would inevitably come into conflict.
While the First Men have the nature-based Old Gods, the Andals follow anthropomorphic deities called the Seven: the Mother, the Warrior, the Maiden, the Smith, the Crone, the Stranger, and the Father Above, the last being head of the gods as well as god of justice, depicted as a bearded man who carries scales (the gods are also described as being seven aspects of one god).
Many religions in real life have worshipped a mother figure. The Romans revered a Mater Matuta, or Great Mother, “the mother of good auspices,” who was also the goddess of fertility, of beginning, and of dawns.16 In Christianity, especially among Catholics and Greek Orthodox, the Virgin Mary is worshipped as the Mother of God, in many ways more revered than her son.
The book of the Seven is called the Seven-Pointed Star, and seven is a number with significance in almost all religions; the Catholic and Orthodox churches have seven sacraments, seven deadly sins, and seven archangels, while in Islam there are the seven circuits of the Kaaba and seven destructive sins. The Babylonians had seven gates of hell, and in Greek mythology there were seven daughters of Atlas; the Hindus have seven stages to their wedding and the Bahai seven “valleys” or experiences.
Today the Yazidi minority of northern Iraq follow a religion strongly resembling Martin’s New Gods; they believe in one deity who had entrusted the world to seven holy beings, the “Heptad,” most pre-eminent of whom is Melek Taus, the “Peacock Angel” whom they worship. Melek Taus is also known as Lucifer, but to the Yazidi, although Lucifer was an angel who rebelled against God, he has since repented and is now restored to his favor. However, the Yazidi worship of Lucifer is often used as an excuse for persecution by Islamic fundamentalists (as if they needed one). This horror gained worldwide attention in the summer of 2014 when the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS) drove the Yazidi out of their homes in Nineveh, murdering more than four thousand and enslaving twice as many.
The faith of the Yazidis is rooted in ancient Iranian folklore, mixed with elements of Christianity and Islam, as well as Babylonian religions. The ancient Babylonians, like them, prayed toward the sun, sacrificed a bull every year and had taboos about wearing blue or killing fish. (The Babylonians also worshipped birds.)
Religious violence is evident in fantasy, too, and there are allusions to past conflict in the books, between the followers of the Old and New Gods, between more traditional nature-worship, and anthropomorphic religions. In Westeros, the New Gods are themselves challenged by R’hllor, the “Lord of Light,” a faith spread by Melisandre, a priestess who has converted Stannis Baratheon to her new faith. Her religion is dualist, with the priests believing in two gods at war. It has many influences from Gnosticism and Manicheanism, religions that emerged in the Near East that saw the world divided into light and darkness. Manicheanism, was founded by the Iranian Mani who lived in the third century and taught that life is a constant struggle between a spiritual world of light and an evil world of darkness. Mani was martyred by the Iranian Zoroastrian hierarchy in 274, but afterwards his ideas spread to the Roman empire.
Gnosticism, a word that covers a range of pre-Christian and Christian beliefs, holds that an evil false god, the demiurge, created our imperfect world and therefore brought chaos to the universe; so for Melisandre sacrificing people was actually freeing them from this awful world. Although the Gnostics were driven out by mainstream Christians, they later influenced the Cathars, a heresy that emerged in the south of France during the twelfth century and whose adherents believed that all material things were essentially evil. Indeed, some Gnostics thought the universe itself was a mistake.
There are still some dualist religions around today, among them Mandaeism, whose followers believe in a world separated between darkness and light, with spirits guiding the righteous to the world of light after their deaths. They originated at around the time of Christianity and hold John the Baptist in esteem, but reject Jesus as well as Abraham and Moses, and speak an obscure dialect of Aramaic. This faith still barely clings on in Iraq, with a few thousand believers remaining, although their numbers have been devastated since the 2003 invasion; there are now as many Mandeaens in Sweden as in their native land.
But the most fitting parallel with the faith of R’hllor is Zoroastrianism, the native religion of Persia and the oldest surviving faith on earth. Zoroaster lived around the year 1000 BC and taught that the universe was divided into two principles, Ahura Mazda (Illuminating Wisdom) and its opposite, Angra Mainyu (Hostile Spirit). To Zoroastrians, Ahura Mazda is the lord of light and wisdom, who created the universe and brings “goodness from evil, light from darkness”; this is in contrast to Angra Mainyu, lord of darkness, who created the evil in humankind. This Great Other is a dark god “whose name must not be spoken.”17 Until the Arab conquest brought Islam to the country, Zoroastrianism was the official religion of Persia, although they constitute only a small minority today.
The most telling similarity is the emphasis on fire. In Persia, followers of Ahura Mazda worshiped it, believing fire was the son of their god, and its sacred fire brought joy to believers and destruction to the lovers of evil. In comparison, R’hllor’s priests call him “the Heart of Fire, the God of Flame and Shadow.” Ancient Persians also used fire for purification and healing, as does Melisandre, for as she said, “The night is dark and full of terrors . . . but the fire burns them all away.”
Zoroaster talked of a future battle and a crisis in the world that would bring about its rebirth, and after a miraculous virgin birth, a hero called Saoshyant would lead the final battle, and the mountains will melt into a flaming river; again, this is similar to Melisandre’s search for Azor Ahai and his flaming sword. Likewise, the use of the word Maegi in the Red God’s religion, which echoes the Zoroastrian Magi who “performed certain rituals and ceremonies connected with fire, sacrifices and burials” and “may have claimed supernatural knowledge and acted as fortune-tellers, astrologers, magicians, sorcerers, tricksters, and charlatans.”18 Magi is where we get “magician,” and is the name given to the wise men who arrived soon after the birth of Jesus.
It should be pointed out that Zoroastrians did not practice human sacrifices, and that while the religion was at time intolerant—apostasy could be punished by death—in more recent years they have been a small and vulnerable minority suffering persecution (and whose most famous recent adherent was the Queen singer Freddie Mercury).
There are other gods in Martin’s world. The Dothraki worship horses, and their religion has some similarities with Tengrism, the faith of central Asian horsemen that mixed shamanism, monotheism, and ancestor worship, and was once the religion of Mongols, Turks, and Hungarians. The Tengric book, the Irk Bitig or Book of Omens, was written in the ninth century and discovered in a cave in China in 1907. Most of the omens inside concern animals, primarily horses: “A horse that is lost in the desert finds grass to eat and water to drink” is considered a good omen, while “A blind foal tries to suckle at a stallion” is considered bad. “Heaven decrees that a slave girl becomes a queen” is good, as is “A man encounters a god who wishes him plentiful livestock and long life.” A culture that divided the world into things that were either good or evil, many of the horse peoples eventually adopted Manichaeism and later Islam.
Then there are the Faceless Men, worshiped by assassins from Braavos in the Free Cities. These killers follow the confusingly abstract “Him of Many Faces,” or simply “death.” The Faceless Men believe death is an act of worship and carry out assassinations; they began as a cult among slaves who wished for their own deaths, such was the horrendous conditions many faced, until one day they heard a slave praying not for his own end but his master’
s. As horrific and insane as it sounds, there were groups like this in real life, most of all the Ḥashshāshīn, or Assassins, a cult that began in the eleventh century during the First. The Assassins were Islamis, that is “Seveners” who followed a more esoteric and mystical interpretation of Islam. Their founder Hassan-I Sabbah was a popular figure in the Middle East who recruited followers from around the region and established a fortress in Alamut in Persia. There he built up his secret society, which carried out numerous murders, calling them the Asasiyun, or “people close to the faith.”
Bitterly opposed to the Sunni Seljuq dynasty, the Assassins spent most of their energy fighting other Muslims rather than Christians, although they killed a number of high-profile crusaders using poisoned daggers (Edward I narrowly became one of them). Sometimes merely leaving a dagger on the victim’s pillow, with a threatening letter attached, did the job; the great Saladin, the celebrated Muslim leader during the Third Crusade, conceded all their demands after such a visit.
Assassin “self-sacrificing agents” were trained to infiltrate the target’s entourage, blend in, and gain their trust before striking, and Sabbah’s men would be educated both in religion and war; they were well trained and well informed, which made their behavior all the more frightening. They often also talked their victims into one-on-one meetings before revealing their true intentions. According to Venetian traveller Marco Polo, the Old Man of the Mountain was able to convince his followers by having them ingest hashish; however, Polo, who was born in 1254, may have been mixing Sabbah (who died in 1124) with another old prophet who lived in the mountains, of whom there seemed to have been quite a few at the time; in fact, the etymological confusion between assassin and hashish was due to Arabic writers and was taken on board by western travelers.
Another, even stranger, death cult was the Thuggee, a Hindu group who worshipped Kali, goddess of destruction and death, and who would strangle travelers as they made their way across India. They are first mentioned in 1356 and would terrorize the country for centuries.19
A group straight from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Thugs could be initiated into the sect by a guru, or sometimes Thugs would abduct the children of their victims and turn them into Thugs. They would overpower larger bands of travelers by joining a group one by one, so that at the moment of execution the victims would suddenly find themselves attacked from all sides, unaware that all the newcomers were in fact working together. Anywhere between fifty thousand and two million people were killed by the cult, until the nineteenth century when the British set up a Thugee Department to track down and destroy them. Yet many Thugs claimed they believed they were saving mankind. As one explained, Kali demanded the sacrifice: “God has appointed blood for her food, saying khoon tum khao, feed thou upon blood. In my opinion it is very bad, but what can she do, being ordered to subsist upon blood!”20
The cult was suppressed, though thug became one of numerous Indian words to enter English through the British Raj, along with pyjamas, bungalow, pundit, shampoo, yoga, karma, and blighty.
10
WINTER IS COMING
Fear is for the winter, my little lord, when the snows fall a hundred feet deep and the ice wind comes howling out of the north.
—OLD NAN
Farmers in the Saastal Valley in Switzerland were probably the first to notice the changing weather, back in the 1250s, when the Allalin glacier began to move down the mountain.1 Or perhaps the Norse colonists in bitterly-cold Greenland, already on the edge of survival, may have felt the pressure starting to tell. Ivar Baardson, a Norwegian priest of the time, wrote: “The ice now comes . . . so close to the reefs none can sail the old route without risking his life.”2 But across the known world more and more people would have noticed the weather, as four cold winters in a row hit from 1308; the Thames even froze, dogs chasing rabbits across the icy surface, and nobody could remember that ever happening.
And yet no one in Europe could have had any inclination of the approaching disaster. The Chronicle of Guillaume de Nangis, written by a monk at the Abbey of Saint-Denis outside Paris, recorded that in April 1315 the rains came down hard—and didn’t stop. The deluge continued day after day until August, one account stating that it rained for 155 days continually, everywhere in Europe north of the Alps and west of the Urals.3
The rain flooded the fields and, drenched and starved of sunlight, the crops failed. The price of food doubled and then quadrupled, and desperate bands of starving country people could be heard groaning in despair; the poor “gnawed, just like dogs, [on] the raw dead bodies of cattle” and “grazed like cows on the grasses of the field.”4 There was misery “such as our age has never seen,” a chronicler recorded sadly.5 As many as a tenth of the population of England starved to death over the next two years, and some parts of the continent suffered even worse. It was the worst famine Europe had ever known.
The climate is always at the mercy of faraway events, and human catastrophes often arise as a result of volcanic eruptions in distant continents. Explosions in Tambora, Indonesia in 1815 and Laki in Iceland in 1873 caused severe famines around the world, and back in 1257 a huge volcanic eruption in Indonesia led to widespread hunger in Europe; one of the consquences of this was the popular discontent that led to Simon de Montford’s rebellion and the establishment of Parliament.
But this was on an altogether new level. The years from 1303 to 1328 were the coldest twenty-five-year period ever recorded. Four of those years were “severe,” the worst winters in four centuries, with snow from fall to spring and rivers and lakes frozen for at least a month across the continent. It became so frigid that horsemen could travel on the frozen sea all the way from Denmark to Sweden, a distance of two miles at its shortest.
In historical times, the planet went through a number of extended periods of relative warmth and cold, rather similar to the long winters of Westeros, and cold spells, it was always known, brought hunger. In pagan times, Germanic people would hang evergreen trees outside their houses to ward off the winter, and Ded Moroz, the Slavic equivalent of the Germanic Santa Claus, has its origins in Zimnik, the pagan god of winter (transformed into a benevolent figure by Christians). Christmas trees may be a modern-day hangover from that ancient terror.
For a number of reasons relating to atmosphere, the earth intermittently goes through ice ages, of which there have been four major ones in the last billion years. We are technically within one right now, but within these large ice ages there are warmer periods called interglacials and colder periods called glacials, colloquially also known as “ice ages.” For four hundred years Europe experienced the Medieval Warm Period, something we know because of the amount of radioactive isotope Carbon-14 found in tree rings. This is formed by cosmic-ray interaction with nitrogen and oxygen in the upper atmosphere, so the less solar activity, the more Carbon-14. Victorian historian H. H. Lamb was the first to suggest the idea based solely on chronicles that, he noted, referred to strange phenomena, such as vineyards in the north of England. He was right, and since then a huge variety of different measurements have proved him correct, among them not just tree rings, but also the height of tree-lines and pollen in peat bogs.
This long summer started in the ninth century, and for many years vineyards were scattered across England, including such areas as Ely in East Anglia and the Vale of Gloucester in the west. William of Malmesbury, a twelfth century chronicler, wrote that “In this region the vines are thicker, the grapes more plentiful and their flavor more delightful than in any other part of England. Those who drink this wine do not have to contort their lips because of the sharp and unpleasant taste, indeed it is little inferior to French wine in sweetness.”6
The increased warmth led to an extra twenty days growing season in Europe, and as a result far more food was available. England’s population went from one and a half million in 1000 to five million in 1300, France’s from under six million to between seventeen and twenty-one million in the same period. In Europe as a whole
, the number of people increased fourfold.
And yet as the population grew, so did the number of people scratching a living on poor-quality, marginal land. Calorie intake went into decline, and surviving skeletons show that the average height in England fell from about 174cm (5'7") at the turn of the millennium to 168cm (5'5") in the fourteenth century.7 And so when winter arrived suddenly between 1310 and 1330, millions starved.
The first signs of the coming winter came in the thirteenth century, when pack ice in the North Atlantic began to advance south, as did glaciers in Greenland. Surviving plant material from Iceland suggests an abrupt decrease in the temperature from 1275—and a reduction of one degree made a harvest failure seven times more likely. As the spring of 1316 approached, there were prayers for the return of the sun. They were not heard. In April, the grey skies turned black and the rain came down again: “Cold, hard, and pelting; it stung the skin, hurt the eyes, reddened the face, and tore at the soft, wet ground with the force of a plough blade.”8
In October, four mills along the river Avon in the west of England were swept away, as were fourteen bridges on the Mur in Austria. In Saxony more than 450 entire villages, along with their people, cattle, and houses, were submerged, with huge numbers of casualties. Dykes and bridges disintegrated, and buildings were flooded and collapsed.
Wood and peat became too wet to burn, and no crops could be planted nor harvested. In England, a quarter of wheat or beans or peas sold for twenty shillings, four times its price in 1313, and barley, oats, and salt saw similar rises in the region of 300 percent. In May and June 1316, crop production in England was down by up to 85 percent and there was “most savage, atrocious death” and “the most tearful death.”9 Hopeless townsfolk walked the fields, searching for any bits of food; men wandered across the country to work, only to return and find their wife and children dead from starvation. Bodies were seen face down in flooded fields, weak from hunger. At one point, on the road near St Albans, no food could be found even for the king.