Bring out your dead. Or should I say, bring out your
dead? Either way, The Dead Walking is
such a ubiquitous horror trope that George RR Martin uses it
right away in the prologue. But before we meet those Whites,
we meet the White Walkers, those who perform the magic to make
said dead walk again. This is effective because while
the Whites are terrifying, those who make them are far more so.
These Walking Dead are part of the arsenal of the Others, the
ability to do that rather than just a force on their own.
But George RR Martin thinks outside the box, as usual, and
even as he makes full use of well tread ground, cemetery or
funerary ground in this case, he adds to the concept by creating
variations within, the closest being perhaps Cold Hands, a
former Ranger of the Night's Watch seemingly doing the
bidding of Bloodraven. Or would it be more accurate to
say Cold Hands was Bloodraven's skin changing into the body of
the dead? I don't know exactly, but no
matter how we categorize Cold Hands, it's correct to classify
his case as necromancy. So this form of magic is not the
sole purview of the others, nor of the Old Gods.
Though he didn't expect it to work because it never had
before. Thoros of Mir raised Barack
Dondarian from the dead with the Kiss of Life, and then Barack
passed that same flame of life on to Catlin after dying.
What was it, 6 or 7 times? We'll probably see Melisandre
bring back John as well, and if not her, well, something's going
to bring him back, most likely. And it probably won't be
science, though an element of science might be present in
Kyburn's raising of Sir Gregor Clegane, who made him into the
Kyborg, the mountain that died and came back again.
That's worth exploring, we think.
So are other stories from Kohor and Nephir, Ngai, Ashai
Volantis, and even the Hightower.
There are ancient tales of a necromancer king ruling House
Bain Fort in the far West, and of another even further W an
Ironborn reaver from House Drum. It's one thing to take living
thralls. It's another to kill a foe and
raise them as your thrall. What is dead may never die, but
rises again harder and stronger is given new meaning.
As ancient as these tales are, there are even older ones of the
Bloodstone Emperor, the Last God Emperor of the Great Empire of
the Dawn, and some others. Back in Westeros.
George RR Martin isn't big on sorcerer's blasting enemies with
lightning bolts or launching magic missiles, but he loves
this high conflict magic, the kind that makes people question,
look askance or go full pitchfork and torches.
Messing with the line between life and death itself is perhaps
the most extreme version of this.
It is that which is beyond most humans, the power that we are
most beholden to, life and death.
Well, I said most humans, all humans, what am I saying?
No one in the real world. I mean.
In the setting of Westeros and Essos however, it is not beyond
everyone. Some people have that power, but
necromancy is so often forbidden despite this in the real world
too. That's right, we're going to
touch on real world concepts and origins for some of these things
and the related concepts like the dead themselves,
immortality, undying things, the search for that.
It's pretty expansive thing in this world with these colorful
beings like green seers, red priests, black goats, and of
course the White Walkers with their burning blue eyes.
Death comes in many hues and sometimes gets right back up
again to live some more unnaturally.
We've got all that and more on this episode of History of
Westeros podcast. Hello and welcome back
everybody. It's another Sunday.
We've got another live stream for you.
If you're here watching live, then it must be 3:00 Eastern
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So take your pick. But if you want to catch it
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a member, well, you get it ad free.
Happy birthday to Nina Krusling, our favorite and most frequent
contributor by far. If you want to show her some
love, go to her blog good queenalley.tumblr.com that's
with 1L and Ally and either wish her a happy birthday and or ask
her a question. She likes getting questions over
there. Or you could just say happy
birthday Nina here in the comments and we'll make sure she
sees that. Definitely show her some love.
For all her many contributions over the years to our show, I
really couldn't possibly list them all.
I would probably need a full episode to list all her
contributions. That would take a while.
If you have questions for us, send them to
westeroshistory@gmail.com or you can hit us up on any of our
socials. Blue Sky, Facebook, we got a
Facebook group, we're on Discord.
All that stuff is in the description, the links,
etcetera. And at the end of this episode,
I will mention episodes that relate to this one.
It's a big list because whenever we delve into supernatural
things, especially supernatural things worldwide, while we touch
on a lot of other topics. Also, at the end of this
episode, I will reveal the answer to this trivia question.
The prologue is the first time we see necromancy in action, of
course, but who was the first person we learn has been accused
of necromancy? That's right.
Answer at the end, but also answer during.
Pay close attention and you'll hear it.
Unless of course, you already know the answer, which if you
do, congratulations, good job. It's a little bit obscure.
Actually, it's a lot obscure, maybe less so.
After this episode's over. Here's what we have for you
today. After the intro and the setup,
we'll talk a little bit about IRL necromancy.
That's right, necromancy is a real thing.
Sort of. Then we'll talk about the
various places where necromancy appears in the stories.
The others, the old gods. We'll talk about anti
necromancy, things that counteract it or combat it or
try to stop it. We'll talk about the difference
between resurrection and raising the dead.
Then we'll move on to the raised dead capabilities of Relore,
then the Drowned God, and with a detour for the reaving
Necromancer. Then we'll talk about some
fictional influences, which will include HP Lovecraft and Mary
Shelley and a few other things. Then we'll talk about Kybern,
the Science Necromancer, then other necromancers around the
world. We'll call that section
Necromancers of the World Unite, even though they're solitary
figures who will never actually unite.
But hey, it's just a clever title.
At least I think it's clever. Hooded Man of the Bain Fort, the
Hightower, the Free Cities, Ash Eye and the Great Empire, the
Dawn and a few others. And then we'll call it quits for
the day with quite a bit accomplished, I think is a
longer episode docked than usual.
We'll see how long it actually takes.
Let's get to it, my friends. With our setup, humanity has
long been concerned with what happens after death, life after
death, spirits and souls, all those related concepts.
George is no stranger to that. It's a great thing to write
about. It's a perfect thing to included
in a fantasy setting. Necromancy from a fantasy
perspective, is thus kind of a gross perversion of that idea,
which is what makes it great fodder for villains and stories
and conflict. What George has done is
something conceptually you're likely very familiar with by
now. He's taking a practice that is
pretty hard to see as anything but evil.
Like necromancy, you don't really have a lot of well,
sometimes it's good, some just bad.
Most of the time, if not all the time, it's considered evil,
right? And that's generally how it's
viewed both in world, in the real world, other fantasy
stories, it's pretty hard to find stories where a necromancy
is thought of as good by a large number of people.
Only a few individuals will ever really say that if if anyone,
Right. Some people are like, yeah, I'm
a necromancer, I'm evil. Yeah, of course, of course I'm
evil, right. That's that's evil business.
But that's not how George likes to operate, is it?
That part doesn't fit with George in a certain way.
It does because most of the necromancy in in the story is
shunned or looked down on. But if you consider it with the
overall theme of power, what we get is a great form of conflict.
The conflict that comes from the decent or even good people who
are tempted to use an evil power.
We're not talking about evil people using evil powers.
Well, maybe we are. In the case of the others, I
don't even know if they're people, but you get the point.
We're talking about characters like Thoros who didn't mean to
commit necromancy and then shows the reluctance to use it
afterwards. Where the others, like I said,
fairly straightforwardly evil. They may have a grudge or a
grievance, A motivation. That doesn't mean they're not
evil, right? And animating the dead, if it
isn't evil, it's because, well, dead flesh is just dead flesh.
It's the evil that they use those dead bodies.
If you animate the dead and have them, you know, do chores for
old ladies, I'm not so sure that's evil, but they animate
dead and have them kill other people.
So it's it's the intent of the ACT.
It's pretty straightforward. And this also assumes that dead
bodies don't remain, don't have any sentience.
They don't feel what's happening, which that's not a
certainty at all. We don't know.
Moving on to someone like Kyborne and the Kyborg Sir
Robert Strong, it's a pretty easy to designate him evil, but
the effect is enhanced because of it's KYBR like this is a guy
who is a sociopath. He tortures people he inflicts
pain and has no empathy. So of course he's evil right.
Even if even if he was doing all these other good things and he
started raising the dead, I don't think that would make it a
good thing. It would just maybe be less
problematic because it's not being done by a guy that has so
much evil on his record already. Melisandre, good example,
perfect example of somebody who's very Gray.
She's absolutely dedicated her life to saving humanity.
That's a good thing. She gets some things wrong along
the way. Now, if she brings John back
from the dead, it's probably not evil given the context.
But if she was just like living in some village, bringing people
from back from the dead on the regular, that might be a
problem, right? But she is bringing John back,
presumably because she thinks it's important to save the
world, right? It's a very unique situation.
So again, again, I come back to Thoros, maybe the most
interesting example, because he didn't do it on purpose.
There was no intent. It just worked.
He's like, whoa, I resurrect. Well, the first time, the first
time that's true. When he brought Barrack back
those other times, well, he knew what he was doing.
So throughout this episode, we'll go deeper into the
ramifications of this power because I think that's a big
part of what George's intent here with putting it in the
world in the 1st place. It's a dark magic, but there are
times where it can be used for good and that's wonderful for
conflict and for the the people doing it.
They have to weigh on what they've done and whether this is
a good thing or whether, yeah, it's really quite a a rabbit
hole. So that's our focus on today.
Not, not those who make the dead walk if not alive again, just
they make them animated again, whether it's alive or let's part
of one of the things we have to get into whether they're living
or not. And then that's not a simple
thing. You know, if you've been dead
for 20 years and your body rises again, there's probably nothing
going on in that brain, you know?
But if you in the case of someone raised immediately after
death, well, that's a difference.
And, and I don't know where the line is.
So that's something what we'll be talking about.
So yes, we're focusing on the the necromancers themselves,
less on the actual dead. But of course there's going to
be overlap with that. A cork of the undead trope in
fiction is that it is not fantasy only, it's big in
sci-fi. Now some people say sci-fi
fantasy is kind of the same thing anyway, I don't, but I
understand that a lot of people do and I don't argue.
I wouldn't argue with them. But necromancy, You never see
that term used in sci-fi really. Maybe not never, but it's they
would use some sort of other word.
George has somewhat blended these tropes by not only
including some science with it, but by mixing it with elements
that might fit better in a sci-fi setting, using it less
straightforwardly. One of the reasons we see The
Walking Dead, the raised dead, the whatever in fiction is as
well. Like in fantasy, it works really
well. There's a lot of interest in
media that features The Walking Dead, such as the highly popular
franchise The Walking Dead, or in the case of a movie like 28
Days Later, the Running Dead. Now to be fair, in the latter,
they aren't technically dead. It's like a virus that turns
them into what they are, which was kind of like fast zombies.
Or in the case of The Last of Us, it's a fungus.
So virus, fungus, scientific explanation.
But really it's still just made-up.
It's still fictional, still fantastical.
The stone man with grayscale are probably closer to those
examples. Because it is like a disease.
It's an infection that slowly changes you rather than killing
you. In a lot of sci-fi version of
the stroke, the infected are not actually dead, or are, though
maybe that's semantics, but semantics is at the heart of
categorization. If we're trying to categorize
these things, we have to really nail these terms down
regardless. In The Song of Ice and Fire,
it's magic grayscale. Even though it's an infection,
it's a magical disease, which is the point here.
Even though grayscale isn't on the docket for today, I wanted
to bring it up because even though it's all magic, it's
different forms of magic. And that's what we're going to
try to cover, the different forms of necromancy that come
from different places throughout the story, plus the bit of
science, sort of maybe. So let's talk about IRL
necromancy, just in case you weren't aware of what IRL means.
It means in real life. Which is funny because real life
dead Necr. Yeah.
Anyway, you get it. But the dictionary says
conjuration of the spirits of the dead for purposes of
magically revealing the future or influencing the course of
events. That's the real life definition
of necromancy. That is not the real life
definition of necromancy. In fantasy stories, you'll
notice that none of that definition included raising the
dead. It's conjuration, the spirits of
the dead, for purposes of asking them questions, getting
information from them. Yeah, it's like raising the dead
spirits. Yeah, yes, exactly.
And then they're not like walking around afterwards.
They're just there for the length of these questions, and
then they go back to the spirit world, presumably.
That's generally how it works. So in this case, what does
conjuration mean? You got to define the other
terms. It means to summon as if by
invocation or invocate incantation magic.
You know, that's as far as we need to go with that.
It's magic. And this comes from the Greek
Necros equals dead body and mantea equals divination.
Dead body divination, right? That's the, it's spelled out
right there. So in real life, it has nothing
to do with raising the dead so much as it is communing with the
dead, or maybe briefly raising them only to talk to them.
But no, no sort of permanence to that.
Many ancient cultures believed the dead had access to
information beyond what could be known in the material world.
And when I say ancient cultures, and I say many, I really mean
many. There's records of it in ancient
Egypt, Babylonia, Rome, Greece, Etruria, China, Persia.
I mean, whoa, like those are. I named all the big ones.
Most of most of all the big ones anyway.
Some of the biggest ones. I didn't mention India, but I
think they had it there too. I'm not sure.
Anyway, the oldest known literary example is in the
Odyssey. Odysseus travels to the
underworld to get knowledge about his trip home from Troy.
He does his via spells taught to him by Cersei, not Cersei
Lannister, of course, Circe Cersei.
But yeah, necromancy is actually forbidden in the Bible.
Like they actually forbid it in the Bible.
They go so far as to include it and say you can't do this.
It's it's it's wild Jews of the later Hellenistic period called
people that did this bone conjurers.
There's that conjurer again, right?
Here's a quote. This is kind of unusual.
The first quote Ishaya is going to read us from today isn't from
A Song of Ice and Fire. No, it's from the Bible.
Deuteronomy. King James Version.
Here we go. When thou art come into the land
which the Lord thy God giveth thee, thou shalt not learn to do
according to the abominations of those nations.
There shall not be found among you anyone who maketh his son or
his daughter to pass through the fire, or who useth divination,
or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch, or a
charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard,
or a necromancer. For all who do these things are
an abomination unto the Lord. And because of these
abominations, the Lord thy God doth drive them out from before
thee. That almost reads like the list
of magics practiced in Ash Eye. It's like, don't do that.
This, this, this, this, this. Of course, an ASCII, it's the
opposite where you can do any of those things.
There's no rule. This is the direct opposite
where yeah, no, you can't do any of those things.
So apparently Israel is the opposite of ASCII in, in terms
of that, at least ancient Israel was, because this is a warning
to the Israelites not to engage in such practices as the
Canaanites do in this example, it's the Canaanites that are
using as an example. So according to Leviticus,
Mosaic law prescribed the death penalty for this practice for
necromancy. And, and how nice of the Bible
to put necromancer last, you know, as like as if we're
building up to it. It's like, all right, perfectly
placed there. It's telling our story the way
we want. Yet us King Saul from the Bible
invoked the spirit of Samuel. Samuel was a judge and prophet
and he did so via the witch of Endor.
That's right, the witch of Endor spelled ENDOR is from the Bible
and not from Star Wars. Star Wars has an Endor and it
has witches. But the Bible got there, you
know, 2000 years earlier, if if not more, this King Saul thought
he could get away with it because he's a king and he
thought, hey, I'm a if I'm not above the law, I, I am the law,
you know, I'm the king. But when he asked the witch of
Endor for this prophecy through Samuel, Samuel prophesied doom
for Saul, and possibly because he was engaged in necromancy and
using divination against God's commandments.
So that's how a lot of biblical scholars interpret this, that
Saul died because he used this forbidden magic.
Technically the witch of Endor used it.
He just, you know, asked for the results.
But that is kind of the point. It's the intent.
She was sort of forced to do it because he was the king and it
it was his command that made it happen.
By the way, the Witch of Endor is also a ship.
In the Expanse novel, Babylon's Ashes, I haven't recommended the
Expanse in in a long time, so I'll do it again here because
yeah, you get the Witch of Endor.
Now this passage from the Bible is extremely interesting and
highly debated by Christian scholars.
I'm referring to the quote Ashaya read because some people
see it as proof of magic. And you might be like, wait,
why? Why would that be proof of
magic? Think of it this way.
If you believe the Bible is truly the word of God, if you
are a sincere worshipper of Christianity or believer in
Christianity or Judaism or any of these Abrahamic religions
that have the same belief, why would God ban necromancy?
If it's not real? Why would you ban something that
isn't? That is fake, It's made-up.
We don't need to ban things that don't exist, right?
Who bans things that aren't real?
So let's you could actually argue that the Bible claims
magic is real. I would say you can ban things
that aren't real would be my argument to that.
That even if things are fake that the belief in them can can
lead to bad things and that's why you would ban belief in
false prophets and stuff like that.
I don't know anyways. It isn't really written that way
though. It isn't written as if they're
fake though, right? It says you shouldn't come here
if you know how to do those things.
But I I see your point though. I do see your point and and that
is the argument by people who don't agree with that.
Yeah, who want to believe in the Bible but not believe?
In in this kind of magic, Yeah. Basically, because the way it's
written, it says that these magics are real, they just are
abominations. If they're done by anybody but
God, that's the way it's written.
It's like they are real, but only God should be allowed to do
them. And so we should get rid of
anyone who else who can. So like even Martin Luther of
Lutheranism fame and John Calvin of Calvinism fame, they both
thought magic was real too. They both weighed in on this and
were like, yeah, that wasn't really Saul, that was, or
Samuel, that was a wit, that was a demon.
I was like, well, that doesn't, that still leaves magic wide
open, doesn't it? It was like the other one.
Yeah. It was like impersonating God to
to throw him off because it's an evil magic.
Yeah. So that also if you want to look
at another way, say, well, if you are a Christian who wants to
believe in other forms of magic, well, there you go.
There's some basis for you right there.
Now, what's interesting about this too, is that, yes, George
uses the fantasy version of necromancy, not this divination
form. But of course he uses divination
also. He just doesn't call it
necromancy and doesn't seem to have anything to do with
necromancy, which is interesting.
There doesn't seem to be like consider this green dreams,
dragon dreams, flame reading various and sundry prophecies
all over the place. They often come at great cost
right? Like the prophets are often
tortured individuals or they suffer greatly for their
knowledge. But it doesn't really have much
to do with the dead though, does it?
I mean, maybe the weirwood network you can argue is
connected to the dead spirits. That's the one I would say is
the most clearly, yeah, clearly connected to the spirits of the
dead. I think there's definitely
something there, but and maybe the thing with Varus where that
where his genitals were sacrificed to summon some being,
that's more maybe along the lines of summoning a spirit to
ask it a question, although that may not have been a human
spirit. Still, that's the kind of
divination that you see referred to in the Bible where you you
summon a spirit, ask it questions, and then it goes
away. That Varus's description is of
that, but it's the only real example like that in all of the
books, which could mean Varus made the whole thing up.
I've always considered that a possibility.
Varus has made all that up so as well, if you're going forward
farther with some of these real life examples, or at least real
life books, right, like the Bible and some of these other
ones. There's people raised from the
dead in the Quran, the Bible, the Hebrew Bible, all these
books. There's just, it just isn't
called necromancy. It's just called, you know,
raising the dead or sometimes it's called resurrection.
We'll get into that a little later with the difference
between the two is, for example, in the Hebrew Bible, there's
three examples of of a person raised from the dead.
They're almost mundane the way they happen.
It's like this thing happened and that person got up and
started walking again and like, whoa.
We'll get back to the conceptual differences, but let's let's get
it back to A Song of Ice and Fire for a moment here.
So there's some differences certainly to be made.
Let's look at those differences in world rather than in the real
world. So let's hear from Melisandre
and Sam while they're talking to Stennis.
Sam cleared his throat. Sire, the dagger the the
dragonglass only shattered when I tried to stab a white.
Melisandre smiled. Necromancy animates these
whites, yet they are still only dead.
Flesh, steel and fire will serve for them.
The ones you call the others are something more.
Yeah, she's not wrong about that.
Something more. There are necromancers and more.
They have other powers like that as well.
Beyond that, rather now she uses the term very straightforwardly,
in a straightforward place. She.
Yeah. Simply put, the others are using
necromancy to animate these whites.
As we intimated at the beginning, we got to wonder
whether the whites have any thoughts or memories or whether
there's data in their brains that can be accessed.
Like in the case of O Thor and Jafer Flowers, the two that were
found dead with blue eyes brought through the wall and
then rose in the night to attack the 1st Ranger and the Lord
Commander. I think they had the others
didn't know that they got that from those Rangers heads
somehow. Like they extracted that
information maybe because of through the mass.
Same magic that allows them to animate them or the same magic
that allows them to dominate them, whatever turned their eyes
blue and all that. Because it doesn't imply
consciousness. It could just be, like I said,
like data. They've accessed stuff in their
brains. But that's getting really deep
into the weeds of, of the mechanics of this, which we'll
never really understand. I do think the story is more
interesting if the undead can remember or feel, and we know
they can in the case of like a Barrack Barrack on Derry.
The question is how far back, right?
Like Barrack starts to lose his memories, He starts to lose his
sense of self. When does that like hit a
tipping point? You know, when does it become
OK? You're definitely not Barrick
anymore. You're just a walking guy that
looked like Barrick. So that's the topic for crystal
delve into another day, because that's getting more into the
nature of the undead rather than the nature of the woes who make
the undead, which is what we're focused on.
Still. It serves sort of like in the
real version of necromancy, meaning the the divination,
right? Like the the others are raising
the dead and extracting information from them.
Even though they're not spirits and they're not going away
afterwards, it's still they're getting information from dead
bodies, which is real life necromancy.
Since there are so many forms or sources, perhaps would be a
better term of necromantic magic in George's world.
Let's go through them one by one, starting with the most
famous of them, the one we see first.
The Others, though, the term necromancy doesn't appear for
the first time until late in The Clash of Kings, Aria 10 to be
precise. We obviously see it happen in
concept. In the prologue.
We see necromancy in action before we even meet a single
main character. Like, think about it that way.
Like we see the dead raised before we meet any Starks or or
any Targaryens or Greyjoys or Baratheons or anybody.
We hardly even hear their names. We do hear Robert's name in the
prologue, but that's about it. The prologue character Will is
slain by a product of necromancy, his own companion,
Sir Waymar, who was in turn slain by those who worked that
necromantic necromantic spell in the 1st place.
The Others. So the death toll continues
indirectly, though, because the solitary survivor of that
encounter, Garrard, is executed for desertion.
Driven mad by what he saw. And was he driven mad by the
Others themselves, or seeing the dead walk, seeing them kill his
companions, or some combination of all the above?
Probably one thing that the Others do that we don't see
elsewhere, that maybe is a distinction in the type of
necromancy that they use is they can raise things that aren't
human. And we've seen the make the
flesh of animals walk. We've seen bears and Ravens and
other animals as part of their Walking Dead armies.
So their use of necromancy is somewhat indiscriminate.
It seems like if it was ever alive, it can be raised and
added to an undead army if it's legs aren't flopping around.
If it's you know, half burnt, then there's not much point in
raising that being it can't keep up.
But that gets into how they are able to do this in the 1st
place, which we're going to talk about.
Here's a really interesting part.
There's a deleted passage from Storm of Swords where Mance
leads his men to the first of the first man.
This is after John has joined up so John first sees all the
bodies everywhere and is like who did this?
He can't believe it because it doesn't look human.
The way the bodies are strewn about, the damage done the the
ripped corpses, the the zombies and whites attacking humans with
their hands and shredding them that way and pulling them apart
rather than using weapon. It doesn't look like a normal
battlefield. Mance's reply is no men of women
born, which touches on the old maybe dropped concept by George
of referring to the others or something else.
If it's not the others as the Neverborn, which is something
that was included in some of the early literature surrounding the
series, the Neverborn are makes sense.
They were created by magic or ritual or something, not through
the womb of a woman like how humans normally come into this
world. But if you're thinking about
what I've just described, you might be wondering, wait, why
were there a bunch of bodies at the first of the first men?
Why didn't the others raise those bodies?
Why didn't they add them to their army?
There's a very good answer. And there's another line from
that deleted scene quote. If the others did not linger
here to raise these dead, it can only mean they're hunting down
the living, correct? That is absolutely right.
Man says that he's right because while this is happening,
remember this is a deleted scene.
It's happening parallel to Sam and the rest of the Rangers
fleeing, and the others absolutely chased them.
That's when Sam killed one of them during that flight.
What this tells us is it's not instantaneous.
It isn't just like the TV show where Night King just raises his
arms in the air and every dead being within a certain range
stands back up again. It seems to take more time and
effort than that. He says that they would have had
to take time to do it if it could.
If they could pursue the living and take a moment to raise the
dead, they would do both. But clearly they didn't have
that moment, which maybe implies it's a lot more than a moment.
It might take hours for them to raise all those dead.
It might be one at a time. It might be another.
Walks up to a being, says some words in scruff, moves their
hands a little. That being, raises up next one,
next one, next one. Even if you got like 8 or 10
others in the squad, it'd take you a while to raise 300 bodies
or whatever, and that might include raising whites that were
killed so you can raise them a second time.
My guess is that, you know, if they're struck by dragonglass,
something can cause the spell to break and then they will need to
be reanimated. You know, in some cases they
won't. There's no point because the
body's burned or its legs have been Hacked Off.
No point in raising that. That's a pretty good way to look
at, I think. We can't assume that the others
have the ability to do this quickly.
And that really makes sense, right?
Because George has long maintained that magic should
have a cost. It shouldn't be easy.
I've never put a whole lot of thought into making sure that
line of thinking applies to the villains as well.
But it it, it really should. And it does here, apparently.
If they can only raise the dead every, you know, one every few
minutes or maybe even longer, then, yeah, there's a limitation
to it. And, well, time is sort of on
their side. They're not like going to become
old and die tomorrow. But still, it's a strategic
consideration. It's a logistical consideration.
You need something that that matters in terms of the the back
and forth of war and battle between these and human beings.
So you wonder too, right? Like, are they, what else are
they learning from the dead? And what other forms of magic do
they have? For example, Melisandre can read
the flames, there's green dreams, all the other things.
Can the others do that? It's it's magic that's
associated with divination in the real world and with this
other associated magics like the others seem to be a product of
the old gods or a corrupted form of the old gods.
So maybe they have a lot of those other powers too.
Something that we may have gotten the wrong impression of
from TV again is the idea that if you kill another that all the
zombies or whites that it raised that they die too.
We have no proof of that in the books.
When Sam stabbed that other no whites dropped.
There weren't any around to drop.
But we still there was no no proof of this.
It's very likely that it came from George that he told the TV
show guys this, but until we see it in the books, we don't assume
it's the case. So quite possibly it applies to
other necromancer types too. It should.
It might not just be the others. If it does work this way in
George's world, then maybe it works this way for I don't know.
If Thoros dies, will Lady Stoneheart die too?
Probably not, because Barrick was able to pass that magic on
without Thoros intercession at all.
It's probably kind of an independent, unique thing now.
On its own it's not requiring him to do anything to maintain
it, whereas it seems like the others need to maintain their
magic to keep the dead walking. So there is again, this goes to
show that not all forms of necromancy are the same, but
it's it's something to consider that maybe other necromancers
out there, if they die, they're dead, drop with them.
It's possible. Let's move on to a related form
of magic. Sticking with the Old gods that
wielded by the Children in green seers like Bloodraven and Bran
separately from the Others makes sense, because while there's
overlap, they do seem like there's some different powers as
well. There might be a lot of overlap,
though. There might be way more overlap
than what we've seen so far. And that doesn't even include
the possibility that the Others were created by this very magic.
The idea that the Children created the Others as a weapon
to fight back against humanity has been around for a very long
time, since well before the TV show, since well before this
podcast existed. Yeah, people have come.
People have theorized that way back when, and I've been a big
proponent of it since the first time I ever heard it.
And I also love the idea that the Others are using a form of
skin changing to raise the debt, their skin changing into dead
flesh rather than living flesh. Kind of a cool corrupting way to
think about it. It is that form of magic, the
creation of the Others that to me, could fit into the same
category of high magic that was done way back in ancient times
to stop human migrations or to to fight back against humans.
The First Men specifically, such as the breaking of the arm and
the flooding of the neck. The creation of the Others could
fit right in line with those things, giving them great grand
powers. But these powers probably
already existed before the Others, right?
Actually, they definitely did. We know for a fact that they
definitely did because necromantic magic has existed in
Planeto since before the Others existed.
So that fits with the idea that they are created species that
was given existing magic by people who already knew how to
use that magic. Again, we come back to Cold
Hands. That's necromancy, right?
And it's Old Gods. It's coming from Blood Raven in
the green sears. It's not coming from the others.
Maybe Cold Hands was raised by the others and the blood Raven
took him back. I don't think so, though I'm
guessing he did the raising of this one, which is shows that
they do have that power, but perhaps they just don't like to
use it because it's, well, it's evil, it's dark.
It's it's goes against the nature of life and death.
And this is they're a natural magic kind of orientated people.
Why would they want to mess with that?
You don't mess with the cycles of life and death when you are
pro nature, especially not with sorcery.
And yeah, it's not a thing you do you.
It's not really the vibe of the old gods you because when you
die, you become part of the collective of the spirit world
or whatever. It's it's, it's supposed to be
kind of inviting, but Cold Hands talks.
What's the difference? We haven't seen the whites talk.
Can they? We don't know that they can't.
We just haven't seen it happen. John is very curious about that.
John wants to know, can they talk?
Can they think? Can they feel?
He saved some corpses maybe for experimenting on later, but we
haven't seen that happen yet. Maybe it's just as simple as the
others could speak through their whites, but because they speak
scruff, we wouldn't understand them.
What's the point? And be like, oh, well, that's
that's what a human sounds like when they're dead and have no
tongue. No, no, that's that's trying to
speak scroth. But it's doesn't it lacks the
the the proper throat and tongue for to form the sounds, you
know, and maybe it's a power that is only returned to the
world because of we're in a high magic era.
Maybe 300 years ago this magic wouldn't have worked, but 600
years ago it would have. Maybe 1000 years ago it wouldn't
have, but 10,000 years ago it would have.
Because these things seem to ebb and flow, right?
We're not sure what makes them ebb and flow, but there does
seem to be an ebb and a flow, right?
Maybe Bloodraven raised cold hands as a last resort, a power
that they normally would shun, that they would not use.
But they only are using it because circumstances are so
extreme, kind of like Melisandre might have to raise John.
Now, Melisandre won't see it as extreme or because she already
is of well set of the idea that the ends justify the means.
So she's not going to quibble with that.
But she might be surprised that it works.
She would be like, whoa, I didn't know I could do that.
I'm just like, Thoros didn't know he could do it, you know?
But let's not get ahead of ourselves.
We're not talking about the the relorists yet.
But it does seem to be curious that Doros is the only one
that's done it so far. Let's talk about some arcane
countermeasures to necromancy. This next section is called anti
necromancy. Outside of naturally occurring
solutions like fire and dragonglass and not entirely
certain man made solutions like dragon steel or Valyrian steel,
which might be the same thing or nearly the same thing of course.
So there's also this concept of wards, A barrier that certain
beings, certain magics cannot pass.
In the case of the others, it affects them and that which
they've raised. So it's kind of like a cover all
for necromancy and necromancers. And of course I'm referring to
the wall and The Cave that Bloodraven resides in with all
those other green seers. Like they can't go in there.
Cold hands couldn't pass that either.
So that does imply that maybe it's kind of a catch all for the
dead or shadows. Because remember Storm's End has
a similar ward and Alessandra had to get inside the walls of
Storm and Zen to release that shadow or else it would have
just been unable to penetrate that magical barrier.
The wall doesn't just prevent the others from passing it, it
prevents the rays dead. Remember they they can't awaken
on the other side. Again the example of O Thor and
Jay for flowers, the ones who attacked the 1st Ranger and the
Lord Commander. This one's a real Gray area
right? Like they already had the blue
eyes on the other side of the wall, but they couldn't shamble
through on their own legs. Not that they could have anyway,
because the Nights Watch would have stopped them.
But like, let's say no one was watching and they tried to sneak
through the wall. You know, they probably would
have just dissipated or just run into an invisible force field or
just, yeah, I don't know how it actually manifests.
Again, don't use ATV show for an example, because little details
like that are not what they got from George.
I don't think the basic concept of it of the ward, yes, but the
like how it actually plays out when people try to cross it.
Yeah, I don't know. That's that's something I
wouldn't imagine the TV show for that.
Cold hands can't pass the black gate.
Probably the same magic, right. What?
So he's the product of necromancy and can't pass.
That's probably why The Walking Dead can't pass.
It doesn't matter who animated you.
It doesn't matter if you're good undead, you can't pass, period.
And he couldn't enter the green Seer cave, even their own cave.
There was no way for them to like make a magical exception
for him. And and they probably didn't
care. He's just, to them, he's just a
dead body. You know, Bran was sympathetic
to him, but Bloodraven wasn't. He's like, yeah, that.
No, that's that dude's been dead for a long time.
He said it himself, like, I died long ago.
That might have been Bloodraven's voice through him.
He may not have had any consciousness whatsoever.
Back to Melisandre briefly, though.
She believes she can make powerful shadows at the Wall,
but can they actually cross it? I don't know if she's thought
about it in that light. So.
So I think what we might have here is a case where the others
or a green seer like blood Raven can raise the dead, but that
spell can be broken through other through anti magical means
again, dragonglass or Valyrian steel perhaps Like if a again,
if a corpse is completely immolated, it's been destroyed
to the point where it can't be resurrected or raised again
because it's just like half ash now.
And maybe the other feels that maybe if you light a white on
fire, just like Vermeer Sixskins felt Orel the eagle when when
Melisandre torched, it sparked that eagle.
He felt it. It was horrible.
It was skin searing. He felt like he was burning from
the inside. He said he'd never felt pain
like that in his life. Do the others feel the pain of
what happens to the? Because if we're thinking of
this is a skin changing thing. They can feel what happens to
the animal that you're a vessel of or that you are in.
Well, if it is that, then the others could feel what happens
to the dead bodies that they're in control of.
Maybe. Yeah.
So I would think that yes, raising the dead multiple times
can definitely happen if the dead body and still is still
viable as a walking thing. And let's not forget too that if
you just cut a walking cut a white into pieces using regular
steel, the pieces still squirm around.
It isn't dead, it's just reduced to ineffectual size, right?
We've seen like a hand crawling on the ground, like ghost eats a
moving hand at one point because it's like that thing is still
got magic in it. But if that hand had been cut
off with dragonglass, I bet it would have stopped moving
because like this that severs the like magical connection, the
magical tether to the master slave kind of dealio.
Let's talk about the difference between resurrection and raising
the dead. There's not a lot of difference,
but there is some. And it's important to get
ourselves straight on what that is.
Here is a quote from The World of Ice and Fire.
Yet there are other tales, harder to credit and yet more
central to the old histories about creatures known as the
Others. According to these tales, they
came from the frozen land of always winter, bringing the cold
and darkness with them as they sought to extinguish all light
and warmth. The tales go on to say they rode
monstrous ice spiders and the horses of the dead resurrected
to serve them, just as they resurrected dead men to fight on
their behalf. Curiously, those two uses of the
word resurrected are the only two uses of the word resurrect
in all of A Song of Ice and Fire literature.
In real life, again, we hear lots of stories about people
coming back from the dead, but it isn't always called
resurrection. It's often just called, well,
coming back from the dead. There isn't always a term for
it. It comes in many forms besides
just to return to the living. In the fantasy realm, it's much
broader because we have all the various forms of animated
corpses and the the various states of life or not life that
come within that. Like are you still the person
you were or you not? You've got souls thrown in the
mix. It's not just the bodies, but
the the the person's inner being.
When resurrection has a capital R that's Christian, that's about
Jesus. When it's lowercase R over time
that's become a catch all for coming back from the dead.
But originally the concept was pretty much Christian.
It was the word, not the concept.
The word was very associated with Christian.
It's a Latin resurrection. Well, of course the concept is
not uniquely Christian, but the word resurrection is.
And of course, that's a lot of languages.
I mean, it's English, right? If you're talking like Arabic,
well, they have a word for that. It's just it's not resurrection.
They have a translator. I don't know what that word is,
Kumaya or something like that, I forget.
Anyway, the other major difference though, with real
world resurrection stories is that you always, you almost
always either come back the same or better, new and improved.
And this is very common with divine beings.
Like when Jesus dies and comes back, he's more glorious and
powerful than he was when he came to came in his original
form. Balder, son of Odin, Thor, I
forget one of the Norse gods, he dies and comes back.
Set the Egyptian God dies and comes back.
There's so many tales of Greek and Egyptian and go going to the
underworld, visiting the realm of the dead.
Often the God is talking to their brother or sister who's in
charge of the underworld. Say, hey bro, can I get in there
to talk to somebody? You know, it's like because
they're all related, a lot of times the gods are right.
That's that's pretty common. So it's really old, these
stories of necromancy, talking to the dead, you know, whether
you have to summon the spirit or in some cases you have to travel
to the world of the dead yourself, you know, rather than
bringing them out, you go there to meet them.
You know, it's just a matter of whether they come to meet you or
you come to meet them. And really life and death, it's
there's of course, humanity is obsessed with it.
It defines us. It's everything.
It's interesting to think about that, though, Like we as humans,
we have so much to learn about life, but we know less about
death, probably, unless the atheists have it right.
Unless there's nothing, in which case, well, that's that.
There's not much to know. But even the nation, the notion
of like, how long can someone in the real world be dead before
being brought back? Like if you drown, which is
something we're going to talk about, drown.
God, hello. If you drown and aren't
breathing, but someone pumps your lungs and your system
starts back up again, your, your circulatory system, your
breathing system had stopped and it starts again.
Were you dead? That's a real semantic
philosophical debate. Did you come back from the dead?
Probably not. But were you alive also maybe
not. Maybe there's you're in some
third middle state. I don't know.
It gets tricky, right? These, these differences.
So bringing this all back, resurrection doesn't seem to be
a thing in A Song of Ice and Fire, despite the use of the
word there. Because there isn't any examples
we have that we know of of someone dying and coming back
better. It almost always they come back
lesser. Barrick progressively lesser,
right? There is no Gandalf the Gray
becoming Gandalf the White in this story.
As much of a fan of Lord of the Rings as George RR Martin is.
Well, the Astari are immortal anyway, so he can't.
He can't really die. But still, you see what I mean?
He came back stronger than he was.
Maybe undead John will be stronger, but he probably not.
He might be cooler, though. He might be more interesting,
but I doubt he'll be like more human than he was.
You know, I doubt he'll yeah, that he'll come off as having a
more distinct personality. It might be a different
personality, but yeah, I don't know.
It's it's tricky there. And within a from a functional
perspective, especially with his within A Song of Ice and Fire,
it seems that is the difference. The difference between raising
the dead and resurrection, or at least where the line should be
drawn, has to do with humanity, as in how much is present, or
rather how much remains. Again, we come back to Barrick
because he is the example of this, because we see step by
step him losing his humanity with each death.
He is the like blueprint for so much of this.
When he was raised the first time, he had a lot of himself,
but he'd already lost some of it.
With each successive death he became less barrack and more of
a simulacrum of barrack. The Lightning Lord was what he
became, an idea, not a person. He lost his memories, He lost
who he was. He couldn't remember where he'd
been born, he couldn't remember who he'd been married to.
He can't remember what she looked like.
He it wore on him, which is a sign that he did have humanity,
because if he was just a simulacrum, he wouldn't bother
him that he was not lesser. But no, he had enough humanity,
just enough humanity to feel the loss of humanity that he was
experiencing. And that is both really tragic
and some damn good writing. George is good at that sort of
thing making us feel bad, but also like, damn, that was a good
form of bad. I was well, well done with that
bad George. And yeah, this is part of the
reason it's so painful. And to think about Barrick and
and his loss of self is this isn't not fantastical.
Yes, the the mechanism for it happening to Barrick is very
fantastical, very supernatural, but it's absolutely something
can happen in real world terms, like you can lose memory, you
can have massive memory loss. You can feel separate, You can
feel less than. We can wrap ourselves in
identities that aren't real or that we can we can become
something that is less than ourselves.
Like we can become married to our work or something else about
us that doesn't make us happy. We can lose what made ourselves
make made us what we were. Doesn't have to take magic to do
that. Doesn't have to take dying
multiple times for that. Real life is complicated enough
without bringing life and death into it.
But we can also do the opposite. It isn't.
That's something that George, I think, shows us by reading
between the line. You can because one exists.
The opposite does as well. We can do the opposite.
We can rise, forgive the pun, or don't.
We can rise above our circumstances.
We can do better, right? I don't think Barack Dondarian
could. I think he might have been
locked into it because of the magical element.
But humans who haven't been raised from the dead, we have
more choice. We have more free will than
that, which is another important associated concept.
Agency. The agency taken away by the
necromancers from those who they raised from the dead.
Sir Robert Strong doesn't seem to have free will, though it's
not exactly clear. Maybe he has some.
But it's hard to tell because he was already a follower and when
he was alive, like he just did Tywin's bidding.
He's a a knight under a system of authority.
So he's maybe he's just doing what he would have done anyway.
It's hard to tell, right? Barrick and Stoneheart seemed
driven to achieve their goals, but do they have free will?
Sort of. That's hard.
That's tricky because they're, they're kind of stuck on the
task that they were doing when they died.
But that doesn't mean they couldn't choose to do something
else. But I don't know that they
could. I, I really, it's, it's just
tricky. I think they might be stuck on
that. We'll find out maybe in the long
run if Stoneheart it's too late for Barrick, but maybe
Stoneheart will leave this the river if she leaves the
Riverlands to go north or something like that, that would
strongly suggest that she is not just locked in some cycle.
Yeah, again, Cold Hands didn't seem to have free will either.
He seemed to be entirely doing Blood Ravens bidding and they
just discarded his body when they were done with him.
But coming back to the concept of necromancy, whether the
raised being actually has free will or not doesn't change
whether or not it's actually necromancy.
It's not like oh, you have free will, it's not necromancy if you
have, if you do have free will, it is right or other way around
really. But see, that's not the
distinction. That's not the point here.
I think motive plays a role. Like again, if you raise the
dead and send them after the living, well that's pretty evil.
But again, using recycling my examples, what if you raise the
dead and have them do community service?
Pretty damn creepy. I mean, maybe they should, Yeah,
but it's, it's way better than sending them to kill people,
right? So, yeah, motive, again, just
like context, determines whether it's raising the dead or
resurrection or necromancy. Motive plays a role in what's
going on here, whether agency is allowed.
In some worlds, resurrection could be properly seen as
distinct from raising the dead on the basis of being whole,
right? If you're still whole, if you're
still who you were, then that's a resurrection.
You could look at it that way, even though what I said before
was resurrection implies you come back better.
But that's again, that's kind of from the Christian influence.
George's version doesn't have to work that way, but it doesn't
seem to work that way on planet. It seems like all versions of
coming back from the dead leave you as less than.
Either way. There's no clear line here.
No either or. It's a spectrum, like many
things in life. You can't make it black and
white. You have to look at ranges,
Shades of Grey in between. When John comes back, will he be
different? Most certainly.
But will he be less human? That's not the same thing, and
we don't know yet. Are you automatically less human
if you've broken the rules of death?
Well, surely the answer is yes if you're talking about a
walking corpse with no just shambling about.
But what about the TV version of Jon Snow where it seemed like
there was basically no consequence for him dying and
coming back? He was basically the same guy
that I would say yes, he's still just as human as he was before.
He had a life after death experience but came back.
Plenty of real people have had that.
Like they almost drowned you almost died, You, you, you,
you're in surgery and you're declared legally dead.
But you come back again using that example of someone who's
stopped breathing because their lungs are full of water, but
still CPR brings you out of it. Lady Stoneheart again, maybe the
line is somewhere between Stoneheart and the TV version of
Jon Snow. She has Catlin in her.
There's parts of Catlin in her. She there's the vindictive part,
the part that remembers what family she belonged to and the
part that remembers that Arya is alive and is searching for her.
Those are Catlin things. Those aren't just, you know,
dead person remembering what to do.
And it's also a good example of why it's not simple.
Now we might actually get Jon Snow's death POV.
Like we get to see what he's like inside and we'll get to
compare the two and what's different there.
And that'll be that'll be curious.
It was kind of a wasted opportunity on the show.
Maybe not kind of definitely a wasted opportunity in the show.
But George isn't going to do that.
George isn't going to abandon all that set up.
John's just not going to just pop up and be the same.
Definitely not. And I hope we keep his POV.
There's a chance we lose it. We lost Kat's POV after she
died. So we didn't get to we didn't
get to see the inner workings of the undead mind.
I hope we get it for John. But if we don't, well, that's
why, because it's an undead mind.
So again, I want to reiterate terms like necromancy,
resurrection. Judge them based on context, not
on strict definition. At least when it comes to A Song
of Ice and Fire. Let's talk about relore.
The powers of the Red God have much to do with overcoming human
restrictions on life and death. Their idea of paradise, which is
kind of an equivalent of heaven if you want to think about it
that way, is a summer that doesn't end, where no one dies.
That actually sounds terrible, but it's also kind of the
opposite of the others. A winter that doesn't end and
everyone dies, whereas the summer that doesn't end and no
one dies. The only similarity there is
that it's the season that doesn't end.
We have the opposing season and the opposing outcome for
humanity. The red gods version, Yeah, it's
pretty bad. I mean, it sounds good to some
people who have drinking, who've drank the kool-aid, but that no
one ever dying. Endless summer, that's not good.
Nature wouldn't be cool with that.
Overpopulation plus ecological disasters, Yeah, that's not
good. I think the I think the old guys
understand that this is a bad idea.
The Children of the Forest would look at that and go, that's not
good. We know nature, that's not good.
You got to have cycles, You got to have seasons, you know?
But in both of these examples, both of these versions, the
magic wielders are the masters, as in the masters and the
slaves. The others rule the dead through
necromancy, while the priests of Rellore are in charge via being
at the top of the church hierarchy.
They're the religious they're the head of the hierarchy There
hierarchy is the right word and by being the ones that actually
wield magic, which is part of why they're at the top of the
hierarchy. Ancient Greek culture is one
place we can find some push back against this idea.
The Greeks were big on the concept of immortality, but it
was very much like the Christian version of resurrection where
you you could die and come back as a God be the basically being
the same or humans can earn immortality in death, but it's
different. It is kind of like the
resurrection word, but you don't come back to live among the
living you get There's kind of two versions of immortality in
the Greek world for humans and sometimes you get both.
One of them is you are immortalized, meaning you are
never forgotten. So you your name is never
forgotten. There's nothing to do with you
being alive or living on and somewhere else.
It means you are remembered forever immortalized.
Not truly immortal, but there is the the more strict version of
immortality where say Achilles, Achilles was whisked away from
his own funeral pyre and made immortal by his mother.
He went on to live in the Elysian Plains, which is an
afterlife. So he to this day, Achilles is
still walking, walking around on the on the Elysian Plains.
So like a perfect example of what I'm saying here.
He died, but was both immortalized in the sense that
hey, we're talking about him 2000 years later.
No one's forgotten this guy. And he is also living on in the
afterlife because of his immortal, his magical mother,
his supernatural mother that gave that to him.
So it's kind of like a soul. It killed the soul of Achilles
lives on in the Elysian Plains, like many people believe people
will live on in heaven or one of the other versions of heaven
that exists. So more straightforward than any
of that stuff, which is a little, you know, out there in
terms of not, not specific. It's not as detailed.
The kiss of life is something we see very straightforwardly.
Well, see, it's still kind of off page, but we see most of it.
Thoros Amir once again is the very first person we see perform
it, and of course no one else has done it yet that we've seen.
And to hear him tell it, he had done it many times without
success until quote. I have no magic child, only
prayers. That first time his lordship had
a hole right through him and blood in his mouth, I knew there
was no hope. So when his poor torn chest
stopped moving, I gave him the good God's own kiss to send him
on his way. I filled my mouth with fire and
breathed the flames inside him down his throat to lungs and
heart and soul. The last kiss it is called, and
many a time I saw the old priests bestow it on the Lord's
servants as they died. I had given it a time or two
myself, as all priests must, but never before had I felt a dead
man shudder as the fire filled him, nor seen his eyes come
open. It was not me who raised him, my
lady, It was the Lord. Rellore is not done with him
yet. Life is warmth, and warmth is
fire, and fire is gods and gods alone.
You could see the Christian influence there.
Where when we went through those Bible passages, the point wasn't
these magics do exist, but only God should be allowed to use
them. This is what is thorough saying
here, that I didn't do it. No, the Lord did it.
It's God's magic, God's alone. I'm just a vessel.
Right? But it's a curious thing to do.
Like sending flame from their mouth into the dead.
Surely they didn't always do this without expectation of any
results. You're telling me that for
10,000 years reloris have been whatever that means, filling
their mouth with fire, breathing it into the dead and expecting
no result? I think it probably used to work
back in the day. It was how they discovered this
and they kept doing it, bringing back their own followers or
their own high-ranking individuals within within the.
The structure of the church, the, the Super, the people who
are most important, perhaps, maybe not everybody, but it
stopped working, you know, like a lot of magic did, it waned and
now it's coming back and people like Thoros are discovering,
hey, this isn't just a ritual. It's something that probably
also worked back in the day and is now working again.
It was maybe it's been so long that he had never heard of it
actually working. Maybe it's been 1000 years or
something like that, maybe even longer.
So this is really important too, because Thoros is very he's just
amazed. He's like, he can't believe it
worked and he almost doesn't want it to be from him.
He's it's part of this saying it's the power of the Lord is
him projecting because he doesn't want to be responsible
for it. I think it's a bad thing.
He doesn't raise anybody else. That's a big deal, right?
He only re raises Barrick repeatedly.
He refuses to raise Stoneheart and and then Barrick just does
it on his own. So he's very reluctant to use
this power again. It's possible he hasn't even
tried. It's possible that after it
worked on Barrick, he's like, oh, go, I'm not doing that
again. This is necromancy.
I'm not comfortable with this. I'm OK bringing Barrick back.
He's our leader. We need him.
And given Thoros his sincere belief in why Barrick was
raised, like because the Lord isn't done with him, he's like,
OK, well, I'm, I'm going to follow through with that.
But he's doesn't want to look behind the curtain to see if
there's more. He doesn't want to raise anybody
else. And it's isn't that telling that
he hasn't tried as far as we know.
Like he only did it with Barrick multiple times and nobody else.
That's really, really interesting to me.
And he says each time is harder. Not Thoros, mind you, Barrick.
Barrick says each time is harder.
Actually, no, it it I'm wrong. It's more difficult on both of
them. Thoros says the the spell is
harder each time. So it's tougher on Barrick and
tougher on Thoros. And that's why eventually it has
to stop. Part of Barrett's coupled mind
manifests in just the idea that he's died many times, and it's
his loss of humanity is a big deal to him.
He describes the taste of fire and asks, are you my mother,
Thoros? Because he's, well, he's born
again. He can't remember the life
before that, much of the life before that death.
And so it's like he was born with a hole in his chest and
fire in his mouth. And what the heck does that
taste like? He says the taste of fire.
And I have no idea what that tastes like.
It tastes like burning. I guess Ralph would know.
Yeah, we know. What a weird question, though,
the philosophical question that Barrick asked.
Are you my mother? Thoros like are it's it's it
gets back to that concept of the of the Neverborn.
He was born of no mother, right. Reborn in this case, and this is
a question from the undead. Do the necromancer in this case
really it's probably unfair to call Thoros that cause again, it
was it's intent in in my mind as I just explained, intent means
so much there and Thoros wasn't trying to bring back the dead
the first time. There are necromancers around
the world of A Song of Ice and Fire and unless he keeps doing
it, it's probably not correct to call him that.
But he did it, at least the this in this case.
So it's A Song of Ice and Fire is riddled with similar examples
of moral conundrums. Doing the lesser of two evils to
prevent a greater evil is something we see happen a lot.
But it's not always easy to judge which evil is actually
greater, right. Sometimes the lesser evil might
like that might be the worst of the two.
You, you, you did lesser evil to stop the greater.
Well, I'm going to quibble with you on which of those two is the
greater evil, especially when you can't tell the long term
consequences. Like that's the thing here.
Like, well, what are the long term consequences of nobody
dying, of everybody being brought back from the dead?
OK. And if you can't bring everybody
back, then is it fair to only bring some people back?
Well, what if it's Jon Snow? What if it's, you know, Barrack
Dandarian and it's circumstances are really extreme?
Yeah, it's not easy. It's not easy.
That's what George gives us. He gives us really difficult
moral questions that are not answerable.
They're only something you can kind of frame and you have to
set it aside. You you'll never, you can't get
a, a straightforward answer. So another curious aspect of
this is that is Barrick passing it on.
Like that's bizarre to me. Like what kind of a necromancer
necromantic magic can be passed from the receiver to another
target? It's this is something I can't
think of any other examples of. Let's get the quote from when
Brienne discovers it. Lady Catelyn.
Tears filled her eyes. They said they said that you
were dead. She is, said Thoros Amir.
The phrase slashed her throat from here.
When we found her by the river, she was three days dead.
Harwin begged me to give her the kiss of life, but it had been
too long. I would not do it.
So Lord Barrack put his lips to hers instead, and the flame of
life passed from him to her, and she rose.
May the Lord of Light protect us, she rose.
So Thoros was floored when Barrack rose the first time and
floored that he was able to transfer his life force to
Catlin. And part of the flooring was
just the state Catlin's body was in Is just she's terrifying.
She's a a, a gross visage. She's I mean, yeah, she's that's
I wouldn't want to look at that. He doesn't say you're wrong.
He says she I thought you were dead.
And he says she is dead. This is he's not mincing words.
This is dead. She's The Walking Dead.
This is The Walking talking, dead talking.
Not very well, but she could communicate.
Combined, this is what we know of other aspects of Relor
worship, and it paints an interesting picture, right?
The the whole notion of resurrection and raising dead
and necromancy. Well, previously we've connected
Zoroastrianism to relorism, and that stands pretty well.
That hasn't changed by this, certainly, but this is another
angle to it. Religions aren't simple.
There's lots of ways to look at them.
So the worshippers of Relor have on their docket resurrection and
the promise of immortality. That's actually not that
dissimilar from Christianity actually.
Really the Jesus's resurrection is the center of the proof of
who he is. Without the resurrection, I
don't know if you have Christianity at all.
And Judgment Day is a future event in Christian scripture
where everyone is raised, believers and non believers.
Believers go straight to heaven on judgment day.
Non believers face judgment. Islam has the same thing.
Well, it's not the exact same, but it's very similar.
It's called day of resurrection. It translates as day of
resurrection because again, it's resurrection's a Latin word.
But yeah, it's the same thing. Everyone's reborn or, or raised
from the dead by Allah. And there's there's some
judgement and it's pretty similar, right?
So kind of similar to the long summer of relore Judaism,
Samaritanism also have it, although it was kind of an add
on. They didn't start with it.
Judaism and Samaritanism started didn't have like afterlife with
promise really far back during the Messianic age, which is
added in I think the second or third century was added to
Hebrew scripture, I believe, and Samaritan scripture.
The the they believe that the during the coming Messianic age,
the God of Israel will give life to the dead.
There you go Judgement day, everybody comes back.
So again, where lots of debate and difference occurs within
real world religions is the dichotomy between resurrection
of the flesh and the soul. The difference being whether
resurrection or eternity or eternal life is just your soul
or if it's your body that will be raised.
Also so of the soul means soul only meaning afterlife, non
corporeal form. But of the flesh means it's your
actual whole body right? Your body comes back whole or
reborn or whatever different from just a soul right?
Other belief systems have a little different way to handle
this. Reincarnation rather than a new,
rather than coming back as your original body, your soul
inhabits a new body, whether it's a person or you know, a
cockroach kind of depends on how good you were during your life.
So yeah, I think these are all this long summer idea.
These are all just similar to these varying forms of judgement
day, right? And that's it's reasonable to
maybe learn more Christian on that because George was raised
Catholic, so that's probably the biggest influence on him.
But of course, he is a man of history and reads a lot and has
been influenced by a lot of things and is very creative on
top of all that. So we don't need to get too
strict with that. So yeah, I come back to this
question super curious. Thoros hasn't raised anyone
else. He's only raised Barrick several
times. Have other red priests around
the world raised anyone at all? There's a lot of red priests out
there. Other ones might be given kisses
of life here and there and getting surprising results.
But if not, why Barrick? Why Thoros?
Why? What?
What's the deal? Why?
So this is so specific, right? So this is an individual, unique
individual, and I really do wonder if Thoros tried it on
somebody else, whether it would actually even work or not.
And how the heck was he able to pass it?
That is bizarre. Thoros believes the Lord of
Light brought back Barrack, not him again.
He's like, no, I don't have magic.
The Lord of the Light brought him back.
Well, then why did the Lord of Light allow Barrack to pass it
on to stone? Does that?
Does Thoros just going to rationalize that he's like,
well, this must be what the Lord of Light wants?
At some point, you got to step in and realize that there isn't
maybe there isn't some guiding hand above you there, Thoros,
other than George RR Martin. So, yeah, that's, that's bizarre
to me. Like, I don't know how you can
reconcile those two things without filling in the gaps with
a lot of creativity. Because we're, yeah, we're
missing some supernatural answers here.
I'm not saying that George, you know, made a mistake.
I'm just saying we don't know the answers.
Lem Lemon Cloak says there's no better healer than Thoros, which
causes Barrack to look at him funny.
Like, bro, I wasn't just healed. And then when Lem walks away, he
comments on how men can be so blind to what they don't want to
see. He's clearly Lem isn't seeing
the obvious that Barrack is raised from the dead repeatedly
rather than being healed. This is perhaps a statement both
on how Lem just can't accept that someone is being raised
from the dead repeatedly that's just not doesn't fit in his
world view, and that it's also a morally Gray thing to do in the
1st place. It's like, well, we think of
ourselves as the good guys, you know, the Brotherhood out
banners, they think they're doing good and they they for the
most part, they were maybe not anymore.
And now under Stoneheart, you know, less so.
So this is denial, I think, but it's it's very serious denial
because it's happening right in front of you, seeing things that
are just pretty blatant and just isn't able to frame them, isn't
able to accept them. I guess you could say this also
helped explain, though, why Thoros isn't getting other
requests to raise people. Like if Lemon just thinks it's a
healing, he's like, Thoros could go, that guy's dead.
I can't heal him. And Thor, Lemon goes, oh, OK.
If they knew he was raising the dead, if it was that plain and
distinct, they would probably be like asking for all these other
people like raise him, raise her, raise my child, raise.
They would want all these dead people that they love to be
brought back also. But that's not happening.
And we get a sense of this. It's very sad.
Arya asks Thoros when Thoros had that line that Arya, that Arya
that Arya read earlier. It comes after Arya asks, can
you bring someone back who's lost their head?
Only the one time, not 6. Of course she's talking about
Ned. She's talking about bringing her
father back. He doesn't give her a straight
answer. He's like, well, I don't have
magic. I didn't do it.
It was Rellore who did it. And so, yeah, it's like he
dodged the question almost. And and you read that passage,
Aria is like, all I hear is like in her mind, she just hears no,
he doesn't say no, but that's what she hears.
And and I mean, he is saying no, kind of.
I have a side question here while we're talking about
Relore. I don't know where it belongs,
but it's it's it fits in with this general concept of master
slave relationships and whether that's what's happening when the
others raise the dead. Are they enslaving the dead?
Or is that just dead flesh that has no agency and it may as well
just be a pile of stones or a a tree, You know, Well, a tree is
alive, but you get the point. Which is it?
Or is it something else? And compare that to Melisandre
enslaving Mance Raider with the Ruby bracelet.
Similar concept. Because it's like, well he chose
to do this woman. He didn't really choose.
It was a choice between wear the bracelet and be enslaved or
burned to death. What kind of choice is that?
That's like signing a contract at sort point.
Is that valid? I mean, not really.
So is that worse than being enslaved by the others?
Interesting moral question. It probably isn't worse because
there is probably an intent to release Mance at some point.
Like Mance has to earn his way into the new Kingdom.
Like if you do your do these things for Stannis, you you'll
be able to earn forgiveness or mercy or something like that.
Even though Stannis isn't big on such things and Stannis probably
won't be around. But the idea is the intent is
again big on intent in this episode.
They if Mance does a good job, they're probably will release
him. So that is different.
That is different. So.
But still, it's a moral conundrum.
Like, well, slavery is slavery, right?
Like, yeah, you can treating your slaves nicer.
It's still slavery. Maybe it's slightly better, but
it's still way below the bar of acceptable behavior.
Right. Yeah.
Also, is this even a power over lore?
This has nothing to do with necromancy.
Just a side question I have, because the Ruby enslavement
thing that Melisandre is doing, we don't see it anywhere else.
And I don't mean the enslavement thing, I mean the rubies.
No other red priest that we've seen wears rubies.
So this might be some other magic that she's using that's
separate from relore or just something she discovered on her
own. I don't know, but it's a
curiosity for sure. Carl Karsnark says neck romantic
is the least romantic of all the romantics.
That's right. Very true.
Take out the neck and it's romantic.
We did have we have a patron that had that name for a little
while. A neck romancer.
That's a vampire, right? A neck romancer is a vampire or
a teenager or a teenage vampire. Yeah.
And it's all those things. It's funny when teenagers and
vampires come together. Not not that kind of coming.
Dirty minds y'all OK now? I was right there with you,
Kirstie. Angel says.
I think Doran with the last two letters placed at the front
spelling Endor is a play on the necromancer witch of Endor.
That's funny. Yeah, because Nymeria is a
witch. Queen of Dorne, necromancer
witch. That's cool.
Right on Dorn. And or.
Yeah, that's cool. It's an anagram that might be
one of those where George didn't even realize he was doing it,
because he does that. We've discovered through our
interview with him that sometimes he just does these
things sub subconsciously. And it's not it's not an
intentional thing that he's doing, but it still works out
that way. That's cool.
Good catch. Kirstie Angel.
I like that Dornish Dame says the distinction for me between
Lady Stoneheart and John is that Lady Stoneheart died and then
rose. There was a gap with John, I
think his consciousness continues in ghost and so
there's a through line to the other side.
That's a good point. That leaves out the possibility
that just his brain is going to decay and maybe things don't
work as well because of medical reasons.
The cold might help with that. But I'm not arguing though.
I think it's a great point. Like his his conscious, his soul
will not be interrupted. It's it's the the body though
might be a problem. Well, certainly you're right.
Cold preserves water rots like Catlin had the worst
circumstances for her body right like she was in a river that's.
A very good point. It's not just how John's
preserves this. Catlin's is really bad.
Like her. Her scenario was off.
You can see why. Thoris was like, no, I'm not
bringing her back. Are you kidding me?
That's awful. Like, why did you bring me back?
I'm in such pain. Guilty Undertaker says 3 days
dead. Like, Jesus.
Oh, yeah. Catlin was three days dead.
I never caught that. That's similar.
Catlin. You heard it here first.
Caitlin is Jesus guilty Undertaker good name for this
topic. Are you a necromancy?
Is that why you're guilty? Jordan's name also says.
Have always wondered if John will rise on the third day as
well because of that comparison would also be an interesting
contrast to Caitlin and Lady Stoneheart.
Them those two John and Caitlin with their opposing
personalities in some ways. Well, really just her.
He's not really against her. But yeah, it would be a neat
little coincidence if three days.
That's just the time it takes in Westeros, the standard.
Appreciate the, the comments y'all.
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Let's talk about the Drown God. The very conception of the
drowned God is somewhat undead in nature.
Is a God that drowned? That sounds dead.
Now death works differently for deities, right?
They aren't bound by the same laws of life and death.
But drowning would change you if it if you lived through it.
Let's get a nice example from our Drowned Priest POV court.
His drowned men formed a circle around the dead boy, praying.
Norigen worked his arms whilst Russ knelt astride him, pumping
on his chest. But all moved aside for Aaron.
He pried apart the boy's cold lips with his fingers and gave
Emmend the kiss of life. And again and again, until the
sea came gushing from his mouth. The boy began to cough and spit
and his eyes blinked open, full of fear.
Another one returned. It was a sign of the drowned
God's favour, men said. Every other priest lost a man
from time to time, even Tarl the thrice drowned, who had once
been thought so holy that he was picked to crown a king.
But never ere on Greyjoy he was the damp hare who had seen the
God's own watery halls and returned to tell of it.
Rise, he told the sputtering boy as he slapped him on his naked
back. You have drowned and been
returned to us. What is dead can never die.
We've been long calling this CPR, not magic, but there's
obviously real risk given Aaron's thoughts on the
occasional failure. Some do die because of this.
Not him, of course. Aaron would never allow someone
to die because he's too holy. But other priests though?
That happens with them. So ironically, those are the
ones who actually died during this, the ones who don't come
back from the drowning ceremony or everyone else.
They say they're dead and come back.
But that's kind of semantics, isn't it?
We already kind of discussed this like, are they dead because
they've stopped breathing? But there's still enough like
they're still like electrical impulses.
They're. Not brain dead.
They're not brain dead, that's the right term.
And so you can still stimulate their organs to start working
again. And that's what they're doing
with the CPR. You get the lungs working, you
get the water expunged, and the body comes back on.
But of course, three days later, that wouldn't work, right?
So he believes all this sincerely.
And he's been to the drowned God's watery halls, which is
probably best called a near death experience.
It doesn't preclude the supernatural in this world, but
it might very well be completely just what he imagined while he
was in that dream state. But it's also part of why he
believes he's more powerful. Though he's been to the Drown
God's watery halls in his mind, maybe he really did go either
way. He sincerely believes that makes
him more holy and is why he's able to bring so many back.
He believes he's a very successful necromancy
necromancer, but he of course doesn't use that word.
It's a religious thing. It's not.
There's no Mansi in it. That sounds magical.
There's no magic here in his mind.
It's, it's very much like relore.
They even use the exact same phrase, Kiss of life.
Instead of breathing fire into their lungs, they, well, they're
actually breathing air. The water's already there.
They they get dunked, then the water goes in your lungs and
then the drowned priest pumps it out of you.
So yeah, there's already such a disassociation of death within
the Drowned God's rituals. It's it's kind of neat, like
necromancy in this world with the Iron Isles.
It fits so well because there's they're already such beings of
death. They already flirt with death.
It's part of their belief system so deeply.
What is dead may never die, but rises again harder and stronger.
That's baptism combined with death and resurrection, right?
The Drowned God is a necromancer or a lich.
Maybe a lich is a better term because he's using magic and
eternal life and bringing other people back from life.
Yeah, or or maybe it's his pre sitter, the necromancer, since
since it's Aaron who does the CPRCPRO man see breath O man see
a great example of George finding another way to explore
this concept on the margins, the idea of life and death.
Well, what when do you die? What is death?
What is brain death? What does that look like in a
low science environment where they don't even have the concept
of brain dead. They don't know what that means,
but the concept is is for us, for people in in the modern
world that have a basic understanding of science.
They don't. They think their deities are
already dead. That's what the Drowned God,
that's what that phrase means. What is dead may never die.
If you're already dead, you can't die.
They kind of think of themselves as an entirely dead race.
All the Ironborn are dead under their belief system, plus their
God. Yes, it's a very necromantic
environment, even though they don't use that word.
There's actually a little bit of talk of reincarnation on the
Iron Isles, but that's a different story.
We'll, we'll save that for some other time.
It's related to skin changing sort of.
Now a lot of Ironborn culture is of course inspired by Norse
myths, which has plenty to say on life, death, afterlife, and
rebirth. Well, like like all myth cycles
do really. But some of these things are
distinctly Norse, right? Like the goddess Hell is said to
be half alive and half dead, which is that's kind of fits
with with a lot of how we perceive the Ironborn and their
drownings and all that. One thing George did though is
he flipped the monotheism, polytheism, add aspects of it.
Norse myth of course is a polytheistic religion, but he
made the drown God storm God, a monotheistic or dualistic
religion, 2 warring gods. So it kind of flipped it by the
seven, right? Like the Christianity based
religion is sort of has a pantheon, although they're
really aspects of one God. And the Norse based religion is
instead of polytheism, it's becomes one God.
So that's kind of the ways you change it.
But to get back to the focus here, the idea that George is
playing with notions of life and death within while toying with
the idea of necromancer is a really clever thing.
I think it's it's it's right up there with with the way Thoros
perceives it and some of these other things that are just
really create a lot of conflict for the characters, or at least
for the world. Here's a guy that probably
didn't have much conflict was probably all about it.
And he's like, yeah, this is power.
I'm using it. This section is called the
Reaving necromancer. It's a particularly fun and
terrifying example set amongst several other nearly as cool
sounding examples. Quote.
Many legends have come down to us through the millennia of the
salt Kings and reavers who made the Sunset Sea their own.
Man is wild and cruel and fearless as any who have ever
lived. Thus we hear of the likes of
Torgon the Terrible, You're All the Whale, Dagon Drum, the
necromancer, Rothgar Pike and his Kraken, Summoning Horn, and
Ragged Ralph of Old Wick. Kind of feels like Ragged Ralph
got the short end of the nickname Stick there or the
stick name. Yeah, yeah.
It's kind of like kind of reminds me of Wreck it Ralph,
which, I mean, he's awesome, but he's not terrifying.
So. And yet another mention of the
Kraken summoning horn, something I wish I had even though I live
nowhere near the sea, which, hey, that's that's how I know
there'd be no consequences for me.
Dagon Drum, though, is the one we care about today on that
list. And look at this picture of him.
Does that look familiar? Picture Dagon drum and picture
Sean Pink. Oh look at that, it's the same
guy. That's right, you heard it here
first, y'all? Sean Pink lived in the age of
heroes and he was a necromancer. Dagon is a Lovecraft reference.
In this case, Dagon was also a ancient Syrian deity, but George
doesn't seem to be borrowing from that.
He seems to be borrowing from HP Lovecraft because Dagan, the
story Dagan written by HP Lovecraft, is the first
appearance of the Deep Ones, those undersea dwelling,
ancient, terrifying race that impregnate humans who create,
Yeah, who make half human hybrids that start off as human
that slowly grow into Deep Ones and return to the sea.
So that is more along the lines of what we're dealing with here.
Certainly there's lots of HP Lovecraft influence all over the
Iron Islands, more on him in a bit.
He's part of the influence here, but let's stick with House Drum
and Dagan Drum for a minute. They come from old WIC the
drums, which is the holiest of the Iron Isles and the first one
to be populated by First Men, which may have something to do
with why it's associated with such an ancient form of magic,
at least in this one case. Because as you'll see throughout
the rest of this episode, there are quite a few other examples
of necromancy throughout history, and a lot of them are
not only in really ancient Westeros, but a lot of them are
towards the West. Curiously enough.
Now House Drum has a Valyrian steel blade called Red Rain.
It was one for their house by a man named Hilmar the Cunning,
but they didn't have it back in this time.
It would have been really cool for Dagendrum to be a necromance
or wielding of Valyrian steel blade, but Valyrian steel didn't
even exist back then, let alone exist in Westeros.
Valyria didn't even exist back then.
So yeah, now we don't know the words of House Drum, but we have
their sigil. It's a skeletal hand on Red.
That's fairly fitting for the necromancer idea, isn't it?
So let's let's imagine how this would have worked.
Dagen Drum had a rather novel way of taking thralls, I
suppose. He could capture living people,
of course, the standard Ironborn way of taking thralls, like a
proper Ironborn reaver would. But this guy apparently could
also raise the dead and make them thralls that way as well.
It's rather fitting, to be honest.
I mean Ironborn killing, you know you get to take thralls
either way. This is very much the Ironborn
way. It's did you did you kill that
thrall yourself? Did you pay the iron price for
that dead body? You can't raise the dead bodies
of people some someone else killed.
That's that's not a proper Ironborn necromancer.
Is he an example of someone that when he died all his thralls
drop dead too well became lifeless.
I don't know if drop dead is the right phrase but stopped
working. Good question, but I have no
idea. The being I'm tempted to think
of in connection to this guy to Dagen Drum is Patch Face, a
being that seemed very much dead, whose body apparently had
all the feel of a corpse to it, but somehow by the power of the
sea, I don't know, maybe he came back.
Patch Face, of course, is also similar to Catlin in that
regard, where it's a body that was dead for a while before
coming back. The difference here is though,
we have no idea what or who brought Patch Face back.
I mean arguably we don't really know what's bringing the relore
powers to work. I mean, is that really relore?
Or is that are they tapping into a magical energy that just
exists and calling it a God? Either way, at least there's a
name for it. At least they have a face to put
on it. Patch face.
We have no idea what the deal with him is.
Who is the necromancer behind this event?
Is it a God? Is it the Deep ones?
Is it just the the magic forces of the world that aren't
assigned to a specific entity? I don't know.
So when Melisandre checks out Patchface, he's freaky.
She's a little scared. She sees skulls around him and
his lips are bloody. It's yeah.
So more on that some other time. Patchface is is outside the the
full frame of this episode, but had to touch on him at least a
little because he's he is the undead, or at least worthy of
considering as a member of the undead.
And this example of Dagundrum is, is probably the best example
we have of the prologue, right? Meaning we have a being that
kills others and raises them and adds them to their army,
presumably. I mean, there's only one of him,
not 7, but he goes into battle, kills people and then raises
them up. That's what the others did in
the prologue and afterwards as well.
So yeah, like, it's curious how this ancient example is maybe
one of the closest parallels to what the others do.
Let's look at some fictional influences, starting off I just
as a fun notation. George RR Martin's favorite band
is the Grateful Dead. You know, Warewood is influenced
by Grateful Dead member Bob Ware, and there's lots of other
references to the Grateful Dead throughout George's work, so
that's kind of fun. But let's talk about actual
literary works. Herbert W Reanimator by HP
Lovecraft. Terrible.
A bad story. Even Lovecraft hated it, St.
Joshi, who is the world's pre eminent Lovecraft scholar, says
widely regarded as his worst piece.
So why does it even exist? Lovecraft was poor throughout
most of his life. Throughout all of his life
except for when he was really young.
Throughout his adult life he was poor.
We'll say he got paid pretty well for this.
So he did it because he's like, I need the money.
It was written as a parody of Frankenstein.
Herbert West has a few loose parallels to Kyburn.
Herbert W is at medical school. He gets he gets obsessed with
the idea of of life after death and bringing death, bringing the
raising the dead and all this. He doesn't get kicked out of
school like Kyburn does get kicked out of Citadel, but he
does get banned from the morgue. The school morgue or the the
cadavers are off limits to him because of his experiments.
And he also accidentally burns the place down West at one
point. Rushes the body of a champion
boxer to his lab in order to reanimate him quickly because he
doesn't want too much degradation or decomposition to
set in. Sounds kind of familiar, doesn't
it? Kyburn rushing the body of a
poisoned Gregor Clegane to his lab.
W gets access to a lot of corpses during a plague
outbreak. He gets a, a windfall of bodies
to play with when there's, I think it's typhoid strikes.
We might get that in A Song of Ice and Fire too, if there's
some sort of grayscale plague or anything like that.
Then he gets even more access to bodies because he, Herbert W
becomes a combat medic during World War One, parallel to
Kyburn joining the Brave Companions, right?
Herbert W becomes friendly with his commanding officer, who also
is obsessed with life after death.
And eventually his commanding officer is is killed, and then
he cuts the guy's head off to try to preserve it.
It's kind of the reverse of Gregor, right?
Cutting the head off and animates the body, but the head
on the body of his former commanding officer kills him
with a body attached to it, which might be what happens to
Gregor. So I'm sorry I said that badly
before. Let me repeat.
Gregor got a same body, new head.
This guy got same head, new body.
That's the reverse. That's what I meant.
And Kyburn's former commander, Vargo Haute, famously also lost
his head. What's so relevant would be HP
Lovecraft's Necronomicon, the fictional occult book that pops
up here and there and some of his stories.
And then in other authors, other authors borrowed this and said,
hey, let's just do that. He was throughout his career,
people asked him if the book was real and if he had written.
He's like, no, it's just a thing.
And he, it's, it means Book of the Dead, Necro and Nomicon.
Those are, yeah, those are the 2 words.
Yeah. He, he, he gave the, the smart
literary answer. He's like, no, I can't write
that book. It would destroy the mystery.
The idea of it is best when you're just imagining what might
be in those pages. If I were to write the pages, it
would be. But it's, it's people to this
day think it's a real book. It's it's not.
It does not exist. But people have created copies
of it to make people think it's the Lovecraft one because why
not? Why not make a buck off of a
book that people think exists? It would be fun to see an homage
to the Necronomicon in like the Citadel.
Let's see, Sam is like looking through books and there's the
Necronomicon or something like that.
That is not dead, which can eternal lie and with strange
eons even death may die is a Lovecraft line from the call of
Cthulhu, I believe. So that's very similar to to
what is dead may never die and rises harder, rises again harder
and stronger, right. It's also that line is also in
the Metallica song, The thing that should not be off of their
Master of Puppets album. Now, Frankenstein by Mary
Shelley. That's of course, as I just
said, Herbert W RE Animator by HP Lovecraft was written as a
parody of Frankenstein. So yeah, again, he didn't even
take it seriously. He just got paid for it.
He liked Frankenstein. Of course, he didn't parody it
because he didn't think it was good.
No, he loved it like a lot of people back then did.
And it was written over 100 years before Lovecraft's time.
It's such an important book because it really set the bar
for science based things like this.
Like this was, this is a precursor to a lot of sci-fi
Frankenstein was. And it really flipped the script
for the dead in novels. It Frankenstein's monster is not
a shambling monster. He is a thoughtful, intelligent,
articulate being that is lonely and an outcast and has extreme
emotions because of this. Like, who wouldn't be?
Like he wants to be part of society and live and, and learn
and love and be like a regular person, but can't be.
And so he's becomes violent and angry and lonely.
And so it's, it's a psychological tale of gothic
horror. It's it's definitely gothic
horror is the the genre that it seems to fit most well in, even
though it has such an influence on other genres like sci-fi and
fantasy. Victor Frankenstein is deeply
troubled by what he's done. The conflict within the story
is, is rooted in him trying to undo what he's done.
Very different than a Kai Byrne who has no worry or care about
what his experiments might do to the world.
Or he has no concern. He's it's all for him to learn
his own exploration, his own aggrandizement.
That's what he cares about. And I the closest thing we have
in this world might be Thoros. Thoros is maybe troubled by
bringing back Barrick multiple times and is definitely too
troubled to even consider doing it on other people.
As far as we know, we haven't heard from the children on the
existence of the others. The children might regret what
they did. They might say, hey, we made the
others. We regret that.
That might be a good example of this concept.
The children are the Victor Frankenstein in this scenario
where they they had a good reason or thought they had a
good reason for doing it. But in retrospect, oops, we
shouldn't have done that. And let us recall how deeply
ingrained the concept of resurrection is and was or was.
And it is what I meant to say for for Christian folk living in
the time of Mary Shelley, which was like 18101815, the ideas
present in Frankenstein were pretty edgy.
Like the whole idea of beating death and cheating death and the
otherization of people, things like that.
It was and it was a horror novel, so it was already kind of
terrifying in that sense. But just these these concepts
made people uncomfortable. Also, they were uncomfortable by
the idea of a female author. But you know, there's the 19th
century for you and a lot of other centuries.
So a lot of gender based criticism at the time, but in in
some of that may have served to keep the discussion going on
This book, which is now, you know, to this day, it's
obviously the people that ridiculed it or criticized it
for being written by a woman were obviously very wrong
because the book still is massively influential.
So yeah, take that haters. Now one thing that Shelley and
Lovecraft had in common was that they were both suffered trauma
as children or as in their early lives, like Lovecraft's father
was committed to a mental institution who was three and
died in that institution five years later.
Then his mother had issues with her sanity.
Mary Shelley's mother died from childbed fever 11 days after she
was born. So she never knew her mother,
but she had both her parents were were art were were authors.
So she had a nice literary upbringing in Reanimator.
They were truly bringing people back from the dead with
fictional science like over and over.
Like that was part of the parody that that just kept doing it
over and over. And and it gets deeper to the
nature of self. Like is Frankenstein's creation
mostly the identity of the person whose brain it belong to?
Like if you take a brain out of 1 cadaver and put it in another
body, whose body is it? Like is it, does it belong to
the person whose brain it is, even though that brain is dead
but then revived, or is it belong to the original holder of
that body even though the brain is gone?
It oh it, it asks a lot of really weird philosophical
questions that we're not prepared to answer because the
these things aren't real. The nature of these things
doesn't exist is at least not yet.
Maybe it will one day. Not the magic, but the idea, but
the ability to bring people back from seeming death after a
longer period of time than we have now.
You know, after something longer than CPR, something longer than
you know, flatlining for a few minutes.
Maybe in the future, we'll it'll be longer than that.
So these are weird questions. I mean, especially when you get
into other things like the connection between the brain and
the gut. We know a lot about that these
days that there's a big connection between your gut
health and your brain. So in this brain body example of
Frankenstein, like, well, it's this, the original body's gut is
as big an impact on the brain. These two things work together.
Then is it actually 2 beings in this body?
Is that the correct answer? Or is there just some new
category we have to invent? George is aware of all these
things. He's introduced some of these
concepts and maybe he just hasn't gone.
We just haven't seen the full extent of them.
Sir Gregor is multiple bodies in one in a sense.
So again, Frankenstein considered by many to be a
precursor to sci-fi. Given Victor Frankenstein does
everything via science. There's no magic or occult or
supernatural at all in Frankenstein.
It's all fictional science, AKA science fiction, which is why
it's a precursor to science. Can I say yeah?
Can I say a show that has an example of, I think all the
types of necromancy we talked about today is What We Do in the
Shadows, which has the zombie type magic resurrection.
It has the seance like Ouija board type communing with the
dead necromancy, and it has a Frankenstein's monster,
Cravensworth's monster in the final season, right?
It truly has them all. Well done What We Do in the
Shadows and that show is so good.
It had a good, it had a good end.
It's over now, but it had a great run.
Yeah, it was a very satisfying run of the show, enough to
binge. I highly recommend watching the
TV show and the movie. Yeah, comment if you love What
we do in the Shadows. So not one final bit about
Frankenstein. That is also a bit of a parallel
to George RR Martin. It's that the story is presented
as told by Frankenstein himself in the Arctic in the extreme N
he has pursued his creation to the extreme N the northernmost
point on earth. So that's kind of cool.
During the winter solstice in the arc circle, the sun doesn't
even rise. So it's a it's a it's a long
night right there. As bad as Reanimator was as the
story was actually quite successful as a movie, which
underscores its impact because the ideas were interesting.
It has like 1 of the first depictions of a mad scientist.
The my scientist genre didn't really exist prior to that.
It was also one of the first depictions of raising the dead
with science rather than with magic or deities.
So as far as a movie goes, so that's kind of ironic there,
that it has all these things in it, that This is why we talk
about Frankenstein and Reanimator together, because if
you think about Frankenstein and all the depictions of
Frankenstein later, it's almost always mad scientist stuff,
which is not the original version, the original
Frankenstein. He was not a mad scientist.
He was maybe using some pretty mad science, but as we said,
deeply troubled by what he had done and spent his life trying
to undo what his mistakes caused.
So that's not at all like how Frankenstein tends to be
detected. Not only is Frankenstein
depicted as a monster or as an automaton or is not intelligent,
but Victor Frankenstein is portrayed as a mad scientist,
which neither are the originals. Lovecraft's version as a parody
is the kind that people tend to run with and sensationalize.
Maybe that's got more of an appeal to a mass audience, but I
like to point out what the originals were.
But you know, people are allowed to enjoy whatever they want.
So this is their very good examples of what influenced
George. I think I, I spent a little more
time on this section than I intended, but whatever, it's
cool, it's fun. Polar opposite examples for both
the results of and the practitioners of scientific
necromancy. We have someone who kept at it
until it killed them in the case of Herbert West and another
determined to undo what he had done.
Even if it kills him, he'll go all the way to the extreme N the
Arctic Circle to face what he's done, even if it ends his own
life. Whereas this other guy's like, I
don't care, I'm just going to keep on reanimating. 1 deeply
troubled one who got progressively eviler, one who
made an articulate, intelligent being capable of love, the other
made mostly out of control or vindictive, aggressive, violent
beings and didn't care. So yeah, so obviously this is
taking us to our next character in A Song of Ice and Fire, where
fictional science replaces magic.
The magic, science based necromancy, some combination of
the two has a place in A Song of Ice and Fire deep down in the
black cells and laboratories of Kyburn.
This really makes him seem like a big deal, huh?
We're like the others relore the drowned God Kyburn.
It's like, it's like, I mean, I'm a God.
I'm the God of I don't know what I'm the God.
I'm the God of creepy. I'm the God of hiding in your
closet. No, he's definitely messing with
the powers of gods, though. I mean, the the power of life
and death is supposed to be in the hands of the deities, right?
That's that's usually how this is defined.
And generally when you mess with the powers of gods, it backfires
on the creator. That is not unlikely to be the
fate George has in store for Kyber and we'll just have to
see. Well read.
As I said during the intro, the term necromancy doesn't come up
a lot in A Song of Ice and Fire, but it does come up from time to
time. Here's one of those times Quote.
There is a letter from your lady wife.
Kyburn pulled A roll of parchment from his sleeve.
Though he wore Maester's robes, there was no chain about his
neck. It was whispered that he had
lost it for dabbling in necromancy.
That's actually the first time the word is used in A Song of
Ice and Fire figures that it would be associated with Kyburn
and at Harrenhal. Now Harrenhal doesn't have a lot
of direct association with necromancy, but it sure does
have a lot of association with ghosts, IE the product of
necromancy possibly, and blood magic, which is maybe a cousin
to necromancy. Maybe blood magic is used in
necromancy sometimes. And for more on that, check out
our fairly recent episode on the Black Bat of Harrenhal, AKA
House Lofston. Another time the word
necromancy, or necromancer rather comes up repeatedly, is
the appendix next to Kai Byrne's name.
That's right, he's straighted up in different books, different
appendices. He's listed as a sometime
necromancer, A reputed necromancer, and then just a
necromancer. So yeah, the appendix is harder
to argue with. Yeah, he's a necromancer.
So I guess he was someone that dabbled in it.
He was messing with it, experimenting with it.
And. And that's when the Citadel
kicked him out. They found out about it and
said, no, no more of that, you're gone.
And I doubt that they kicked him out if he wasn't making
progress. I mean, if he was, maybe he was
just cutting bodies open and they're like, bro, what are you
doing? You know, that's terrifying.
Stop that. But it might have been because
he had some results. I mean, he definitely got
results eventually. So it would stand to reason that
he had some early successes. Maybe he, I don't know, animated
a cadaverous hand or a dead mouse or something like that.
Ted Mouse I named a musical artist by accident, but he may
have also learned things at Herrenhall.
I don't mean like from an individual, but there's books at
Herrenhall. And those books might have been
put there by Lady Danielle Lofsten or one of her
predecessors there at Herrenhall.
Who knows what kind of creepy sorceress tomes might be in the
shelves there that Kyburn had access to.
And whatever books are at the Red Keep, he also now has access
to those. And then he got to set up his
laboratories in the Black Cells next to Cersei and is learning
more as we speak. Yeah, even right now.
That's right. Another semantical question in
line with some of our previous ones is, was Sir Gregor actually
ever dead? Is it like the Last of Us fungus
or the the 28 Days Later virus where it just turns them into
this kind of seemingly dead zombie like creature?
Sir Gregor was dying slowly. He I don't know that he actually
died before becoming the Kyborg as again, semantics, but fun
semantics. Yeah, now that quote was from
Arya and A Clash of Kings. It's not just whispered that he
lost his chain for necromancy. This is what he straight up
tells Cersei quote. The Archmaesters are all Craven
at heart. The Gray sheep, Marwin calls
them. I was as skilled A healer as
Ebros, but aspired to surpass him.
For hundreds of years, the men of the citadel have opened the
bodies of the dead to study the nature of life.
I wish to understand the nature of death, so I opened the bodies
of the living for that crime. The Gray sheep shamed me and
forced me into exile, but I understand the nature of life
and death better than any man in Old Town.
Do you? That intrigued her.
Very well. The Mountain is yours.
Do what you will with him, but confine your studies to the
Black Cells. Even Cersei, who does all sorts
of things out in the open, like cruelty and displays of power
and cruel displays of power, knows that this needs to be kept
on the down low. Even Cersei knows this is too
much for the public. Keep this under wraps.
Even Cersei knows that necromancy is.
Yeah, she's like, yeah, The Citadel.
I had a good reason for kicking you out, man, but I can make use
of you for that crime. The Gray sheep shamed open
bodies of the living. Yeah, that's a crime.
I'm glad you see it that way, Kyburn.
What is he doing? Experimenting on prisoners like
he's doing now? Yeah, probably.
He also tells her I won't bother to quote it, but he says you
need to fight like with like, send a knight to kill a knight.
Send an Archer to kill an Archer to combat the black arts dot dot
dot. He leaves the thought unspoken,
but Cersei obviously follows his meaning.
And she's like, OK, you're hired.
Then this is when that next the quote happens, right?
Then after that exchange and well, he produces results like
Cersei can't be like, well that was a waste of time.
She now has an unholy, ungodly, possibly near undefeatable
protector bodyguard walking around with her at all times,
and everyone is terrified of him.
Kevin in his epilogue chapter knows what the deal is, sort of.
He's like, we all kind of know what that is.
Like, that's Gregor. And how is he walking around?
Like he doesn't like thinking about it, but he knows it.
There's no other explanation. It's creepy as hell.
And he knows that other people know like the other Kingsguard
or like, what the hell? So again, you have this thing
just out in the open. This is Cersei again, willing to
do things like this out in the open.
We don't know what the Kyborg can do.
We don't know how exactly, how dangerous or deadly or
unstoppable the the Mountain that died.
It really is. But surely he'll be hard to
stop. Surely he'll be a menace.
Surely he'll be intense. So, Sir, she lost Jamie, but she
got Sir Gregor. Traded her romance for a
necromance, Sir. There's a lot of implications of
that. And you consider what would
happen if the faith, if this high Sparrow learns about what
the deal is with that guy like are they going to call that an
abomination? Will they react to that at all
Will they ever will they even learn about it?
I don't know, they might be distracted by bigger, more
supernatural things, like, I don't know, Dragons or
something. But still, I wouldn't look
kindly on that. Let's look at some necromancers
elsewhere. Necromancers of the world unite.
I made a joke about that at the beginning, how necromancers are
solitary figures, and that is a social consequence of being a
necromancer, apparently, or of using this form of magic is no
one's going to want to be around you.
This is creepy business. This is a solitary profession,
right? You don't have a lot of friends
when you're a necromancer, but it is still a practice done
worldwide. Some examples like this might be
rumor, but in other places we can be confident in what we're
told. But we also have some more
domestic examples. Before moving away from
Westeros. Let's talk about the Hooded Man
of the Bain Fort and take a look at where the Bain Fort is far to
the West, right? But it's pretty close to the
Iron Isles where we find, or rather where we had talked about
our reaving necromancer of House Drum.
And this story is also from the Age of Heroes, so the proximity
is interesting there. The kings of the Bain Fort were
called the Hooded Kings and they descended from the legendary
Hooded Man. I wrote Hooden man here.
What is a hooden man? The Lannisters under King Lorion
married the Reigns, The Reigns of Castamere and their combined
power the Reigns and the Lannisters was able to take down
the final Hooded King. He must have been pretty
powerful to to require both Lannister and Rain to take him
down and that tracks cause Check out this quote.
King Morgan was supposedly a necromancer of terrible power,
and it is written that as he lay dying, he told the Lannisters
who had slain him, amongst them 3 of Lorian's own sons, that he
would return from the grave to wreak vengeance upon them one
and all. To prevent that, Lorian had
Morgan's body hacked into 100 pieces and fed to his lions in a
grisly aftermath. However, those self same lions
broke loose two years later in the bowels of Casterly Rock and
slew the King's sons, just as the Hooded King had promised.
I think the implication here may be that the hooded man whom all
being forced to send was also a necromancer or some kind of
magic wielder, and his descendants followed him in that
tradition until this final one, King Morgan.
We're told that the war against King Morgan lasted 20 years.
And again, it was Rain and Lannister versus this guy.
So that's a lot. But it also says his thralls.
They fought against his thralls. That's another reason I make
this Ironborn connection because the term thrall is used.
But these are probably undead thralls.
These are his. His undead army is probably
what's being spoken of here, which is like, whoa.
And that would be Wyatt took 20 years to defeat this guy because
he had undead soldiers and they might have had to be killed
multiple times at in some cases. If not face their former
friends. Kill a Lannister or a reigned
soldier, turn them and make them a soldier on your side.
Did the people of the Age of Heroes who dealt with
necromancers like this guy or other ones, did they learn
anything from it? Was that knowledge passed down
to those who fought against the Others later in the Age of
Heroes? Again, that's an important
reminder. Necromancy predates the Others,
and this is an example of the hooded man of the Bain Fort.
Predates the others, predates the Long Night.
So were these sorceries originally the product of some
other magical society and then passed on to people in Westeros?
Maybe they originated way back in the great Empire of the Dawn
and circulated in various places throughout the world, ended up
in the ancient magical realm of Old Town, which we also have in
our list to discuss here. Maybe the children actually
learned this sorcery from from another land.
Maybe people who came to Westeros taught them these
necromantic skills that they used to in turn make the Others
right. They may have learned some of
the sorcery that resulted in the Others from elsewhere, from some
other traditions, from some other realm.
It may have come to Westeros to teach them that they, I'm not
saying the children went elsewhere to learn, but we know
of, or at least have heard of magical swaps at Old Town, you
know, way back in the day, or at least the notion of that
possibility. As for Morgan's revenge, you
know the whole story of the lions breaking free and killing
him after he promised that curse.
I'm not sure that's a necromantic thing.
That's just a different form of magic or just a a clever story.
But it should be noted that both Ghost and Summer have eaten the
undead like they've eaten dead bodies that were animated, just
like these lions ate the body of the necromancer here.
So I'm not sure that's the lesson here, but it's the only
thing I can think of. So I wanted to throw it out
there. If you, if you have any other
angles on that, let me know. Because that one kind of that
one's kind of curious to me. The whole idea of the the lions
killing the that curse with the lions and the dead bodies inside
them. Maybe a little bit of a
reincarnation story or a little bit like a Second Life parable.
Yeah. I think it's just, yeah, meant
to be a parable kind of, you know, like that, that.
Yeah, that's the right term for it.
Yeah, I like that idea. I'll land on that one for now,
and I say I will too. Yeah, you, you tell us if you
think differently. It's also hard not to think
about the Necromancer from Lord of the Rings who was actually
Sauron in disguise, because George being such a huge fan of
Lord of the Rings. Also, Morgoth was the original
Dark Lord and Sauron followed him.
Morgon. Sounds like their names mashed
together. Morgoth, Sauron, Morgon.
Right, there's also reference George has said this to the
Marvel superhero Black Hood, whom we also talked about in our
Lost in episode because there's Manfred of the Black Hood.
So George apparently wanted to do this twice.
Also take a look at their sigil. I mean, it looks like the hooded
man. You can see what's what he's
going for here. But it also looks like the
Nazgul, which are the the ring Wraith from Lord of the Rings
because they have they have hoods, but you can't really see
what's beneath it. So yeah, that fits that vibes.
George. George is a fan of the Nazgul,
the 9:00. Let's move to the Hightower.
The Hightower, as I was alluding to in this previous section, is
associated with all sorts of ancient magics back in the day,
and some of those might still be lingering.
It may still have books on the shelf and practitioners within
that have some idea of these old magics.
So double magical, double whammy.
Here we have current, we have ancient, we have magic, then we
have the citadel. Check out this, though buried
deep in the appendix of A Feast for Crows.
Quote the. High towers were instrumental in
the founding of the Citadel and continue to protect it to this
day. Subtle and sophisticated, they
have always been great patrons of learning and the faith, and
it is said that certain of them have also dabbled in alchemy,
necromancy and other sorceress arts.
Notably, this is the A Feast for Crows appendix where Kyburn is
most active with his experiments to create Sir Robert Strong in
the form he is now. He was of course whisked away at
the end of A Storm of Swords, and it's throughout Feast for
Crows where the experiments are taking place.
So of course it fits that these topics would be raised in
multiple places because that's what George likes to do.
He likes to bring up something that conceptually fits with
another plot line in unrelated POV's to add to the world
building. Kind of obliquely or subtly or
sneakily, this reminds us this connection to potential
connection to Kyber. And if there's books on
necromancy in the Citadel, you can guarantee the Hightower has
those two, or at least has access to them.
The reverse may not be true. The Hightower may have some of
the rarest, most hard to find, most obscure books for
themselves. They may not keep some of those
in the Citadel, the ones that may contain items of real power
or knowledge that they do not want to share.
And of course. That's conjecture, but I think
it stands to reason so, and I'm talking again, I'm very
specifically about forbidden knowledge, stuff that maybe was
forbidden as long back as the ancient Blackstone base of the
High Tower was built, which let's not forget that's a thing.
The strange stone exists at the base of the High Tower, which
may imply that the great Empire of the Dawn stretched this far,
or at least had an outpost here. Which is part of why we are able
to thoroughly theorize about the potential for arcane imports to
Old Town in truly ancient days, coming from other places around
the world, perhaps to learn and merge with the magic of the
Children. Like, well, this is an arcane
land. There's things we can learn
here. I want to learn about weirwoods,
Hartrees, the magics of Westeros, and someone that's
already experiencing that from other continents.
Yeah, well, that's the kind of knowledge they would pursue.
Could Sam, as our person on location, learn about the nature
of this magic? Could Sam find books on
necromancy? Could he find books on the
others or related concepts that help defeat them?
Like we talked talked earlier about methods of breaking the
undead spell of of stopping the undead, breaking the rays,
whatever magic has them enchanted and walking around.
We can can you break that spell without killing the other or
using or or destroying the white?
If so, it might be written in books that are in the citadel,
that place where knowledge survived.
I mean, it might also be at the citadel castle black.
I mean the the library of castle Black or Hightower, the red
keep. These books might exist is the
point. But but since it's Sam at the at
Old Town, he's the book guy. He's the POV were most likely to
see that stuff through. So it makes stands to reason
that it would be an Old Town that this happens.
Like, yeah, how to stop necromancy, how to explain it,
things like that. These are all potential books
that Sam could encounter. And given that Euron is not
unlikely to attack Old Town, possibly even take it, well,
that opens up a whole nother ball of wax, ball of wax, bag of
worms, whole more set of opportunities.
If Euron captures books or arcane knowledge like this, all
bets are off, right? What could he do?
What could he do with necromancy?
Like, of all the people in this world that would have no qualms
with using necromancy, he's one of them.
He's one. And he would be like, yeah, can
I do that? I want an army of the dead.
That sounds awesome. Can I have Dragons and an army
of the dead and summon krakens and do mushrooms, psychedelics?
Can I do all that? Euron says yes.
Euron, be our guest. Let's move on to the Free
Cities. Here's another example from the
history of Volantis quote. Blessed with a magnificent
natural harbor and an ideal location at the mouth of the
Rhine, Volantis began to grow rapidly.
Homes and shops and Inns spread up the east Bank of the river
and into the hills beyond the Black Walls, whilst across the
Rhine on the West Bank the foreigners, freedmen, sell
swords, criminals and other less savory elements threw up their
own shadow city, where fornication, drunkenness and
murder held sway, and Unix pirates cut purses and
necromancers mingled freely. It's a little bit of an odd
grouping there, right? Unix pirates cut purses and
necromancers, huh? It's a lot of necromancers.
Or they're a very powerful minority.
Like numerically speaking, there's probably a lot more of
the first three groups, a lot more cut purses, pirates and
eunuchs and eunuchs. Like what is that?
That's not a profession. That's just a condition.
Like I can understand though that they're outcasts though,
you know, other, like other civilized society doesn't allow
them to participate, so they get pushed to the margins.
With all those necromances around, that's why there's so
many eunuchs. If we believe Varese's story,
the. Necromance.
Making them into you. Oh, God, yeah.
Good thing those private parts are burned in the in the fire.
She did just like little shriveled penises just crawling
along on the ground, still, still animated by some distant
necromancer. He's like, dude, these things
are a plague. We got little, well, we got
little genitalia just creeping, crawling along the ground here.
It's a weird place to be. You can understand why the the
Valentines shut this place down, right?
But no, it's weird, right? You got this, this combination
of of outcasts. These are people who operate in
the margins of society. Unix have no choice.
Cut purses. Maybe they come from poor
upbringings and and have to fund their life through crime.
Pirates similar. You know, necromancers though,
this is like you've intentionally made yourself an
outcast. You may you were not necessarily
born into this. Like how did you get arcane
knowledge if you were born in the gutter?
That's unlikely. You know, these other people
were probably born poor. That's why you're a eunuch.
That's why you're a pirate. That's why you're a cut purse.
But necromancer where it's like if you're a pirate and you went
to Harvard, you know, that doesn't really like, I don't get
that. You know, that's weird.
I mean, it'll happen every once in a while, but it's obscure.
Those examples like that. It's not going to happen very
often. Someone that has the knowledge
of like this, like this is too obscure to to learn.
If you're just born in the gutter, born poor, born without
an education, born as an orphan, it's very unlikely that you can
learn these things at least as a as a young person.
Maybe you got through that your early life and came out of it
and you know, that's why you're comfortable outside of society
because you were never really a part of it in the first place.
But still, this can't be easy to learn.
Like where do you learn necromancy?
You got to find a an existing necromancer and be there like
acolyte for a while. Would you trust this person?
Wouldn't they wouldn't you be word they'd experiment on you?
Whatever people people will do a lot for power, though you might
take a lot of risks to to do that.
Where are they drawing their power from?
Are these are they drawing power from relore are they drawing
power from? They aren't drawing power from
whatever the old gods have because this is Essos.
I don't think they can draw power from there.
Maybe Mother Roy, this is on the other side is the mouth of the
Royne. Maybe the water magics actually
have some sway here after all the drowned God, you know, patch
face, there's water magics associated with necromancy.
So doesn't sound like something Mother Royne would do.
But what do we know about Mother Royne's real, you know,
personality if she has 1. So I picture like I'm imagining
what this shadow City looked like and you might have some
hooded figure. I'm picturing all necromancers
as hooded. I don't know why.
It's just the it's the image of the Bain Ford, I guess.
But they wouldn't all necessarily be hooded, but a lot
of them would be. They'd all be walking around in
their robes with like a a Robert Strong or two at their side to
protect them. But you know, shorter, not
that's 8 feet tall. Moving on to Cohort.
We had a whole episode on Cohort and cohort is already called the
city of sorcerers by some. So it's not surprising that
necromancy be one of the many types of sorcery practice there.
It kind of has the trifecta there.
It's got necromancy and also divination and blood magic,
which blood magic is probably the most associated in the
fantasy sense, and divination is the most associated in the real
world sense with necromancy, as we explained earlier.
Honestly, if Cohort did a lot of trade with the Dothraki, I think
that if you got these long caravans heading out to the base
Dothrak, undead caravan guards might be pretty effective.
You know, you don't have to pay them, you don't have to feed
them. And of course the black goat has
all sorts of associations. There's sacrifice.
There's not just sacrifice of people, but animals too.
Like is it permitted in their religion to raise the dead of a
sacrificial victim? Is that like taking it back from
the blackers? Like, hey, we gave this being to
you, but now we're raising the dead and bring is that like
you're taking the sacrifice back?
You're withdrawing your sacrifice to the black goat and
by taking the body back. I don't.
These are questions that we'll have to ask the the the priests
of Kohor. What do they think?
What's their deal? What how do they interpret
things like this? I would have been the most
annoying kid at a seminary school.
I'd be asking all these edgy questions that the priest would
just be like, oh God, you're so annoying, kid.
I got it from George Carlin, though.
George Carlin had this bit where he talks about being in a OK,
let's say you're on a ship at sea and you're trying to have
your last communion or your, you know, your your say confession
on the last day possible, but the chaplain is in a coma.
What do you do? Is that will God forgive you?
But then you cross the international Dateline and it
becomes yesterday and the chaplain wakes up.
Is that the are you good? You know, yeah, that's what
we're trying to do with this episode.
But we're we're pointing these questions at George RR Martin
instead of that some hapless priest.
So, yeah, Kohor a good example, even though we don't have a lot
of specifics there, but certainly a place where
necromancy happens. Let's go back even farther and
further E to Ash I and the great Empire of the Dawn.
I've referenced already the long list of magics practiced in Ash.
I don't need to do it again. But it's a long list.
Nothing is forbidden there. If magic works better there,
which it seems to, then it only follows that a lot of people
would go there to practice an experiment because it's a it's a
good environment, both from permission and from the arcane
environment itself. I picture the necromancers of
Ash Eye as something like a Kyburn, a little bit like what
we just imagined in the Shadow City across from Volantis.
Solitary figures doing weird experiments in a place that
tolerates such Don't ask don't tell environment.
It's perfect for such things, like all sorcerers and magic
practitioners aspire to live in such a place.
Mary Maddur learned from Archmaester Marwin there,
Learned things that sound frighteningly similar to what
Kyburn was talking about. Like not necromancy, but related
to necromancy. The secrets of the flesh, the
secrets of the dead that you learn by experimenting on the
living. That's the kind of thing that I
think Miriam Mazdur was alluding to without saying that
Archmaester Marwin as well might have participated in or been at
least OK with. Because remember that Kyburn
quote? He says he refers to Marwin and
how Marwin also calls them all Gray sheep.
He's not going as far as saying Marwin agreed with me that it's
cool to cut open bodies to experiment on them.
But he did not say that either. So it's it's on the table.
The spell that Miri Mazdor used on Drogo.
A little bit necromantic perhaps, like he didn't die.
It's another kind of semantical argument.
He was never fully dead, but he may have been like effectively
brain dead or something like that.
It seemed to involve maybe a combination of necromancy and
shadow binding. Again, the semantics are hard to
parse here. Is the nature of necromancy
animating the fleshless with no concern for the soul?
Is the soul trapped within, or does it depart at death?
These are these are questions that real world religious
scholars have debated that have a place in this environment as
well. Yeah.
Like if the soul departs at death, perhaps those were
converted to their half dead state, have theirs trapped.
Like was Drogo's soul still in his body when he was in that
half automaton state? Certainly the Ironborn who are
drowned for a few seconds or a minute, their soul probably
doesn't go away. I'm only assuming that souls
exist in Westeros. They probably do.
But yeah, I mean, these are, these are interesting
philosophical questions for how this all works.
But getting back to ASCII and the great Empire of the Dawn,
this connection between those two is, is something we've
explored at at length. It may be that the Blood
Emperor's betrayal, he broke the cycle and engaged in necromancy.
It was part of his betrayal, worshipping the Blackstone that
fell from the sky and engaging in dark arts, including
necromancy. This may be what made ASCII what
it is like the curse of ASCII, the shadow, right?
If you want more on those we we have an episode called Ash Eye
by the Shadow and the Shadow by Ash Eye.
So those both delve deeper into that concept.
It could be that the necromancy learned in the time of the
Bloodstone Emperor, he may have been the one to figure it out.
He may be the original necromancer of this world and
his experiments, his spells may be the basis for all necromancy
after what he learned may have may be what spread elsewhere
because the great Empire of the Dawn had such expansive hold
over the world as far as we know.
Like they are bigger than Valyria in terms of how much
they dominated. So if they had this as part of
their knowledge base, it may have spread to the many places
that they ruled. Maybe it spread through normal
channels. Maybe it was forbidden because
it was forbidden, right? Even then, even 10,000 years
ago, what the Bloodstone Emperor did was considered forbidden so.
So maybe it was forbidden rather.
Maybe that's the evidence that it existed before him, that he
was tapping into powers that were even more ancient than he
was. Or maybe it was just considered
forbidden because it was related to previously banned magics.
Or maybe it was forbidden afterwards and the histories
don't know which happened first, what came first, the banning or
the necromancy. Necromancy has never been cool.
Kids. Don't be a necromancer.
No, I'm sorry it is cool, it's very cool, but don't do it.
It's only cool in the the confines of the story.
So he so he may have started it. Maybe the the the things he
started were expanded on by later necromancers.
The Bloodstone emperors like their their guy he got he kicked
it off and they all they expanded on what he started.
Here's another one extremely far to the east.
Not nearly as well known as Asha in the great empire of the dawn,
but pretty cool and creepy. Nephar quote.
Only one part of note is to be found on the Shivering Sea east
of the Bones, Nephar, chief city of the Kingdom of Nagai, hemmed
in by towering chalk cliffs and perpetually shrouded in fog When
seen from the harbor, an affair appears to be no more than a
small town, but it is said that 9/10 of the city is beneath the
ground. For that reason, travelers call
an affair the Secret City. By any name, the city enjoys A
sinister reputation as a haunt of necromancers and torturers.
Obviously looks a common rumor about these faraway cities that
they have necromancers in them. And this is another really
crazy, creepy association. Necromancers and torturers.
OK, torture them a little too much, accidentally go too far
and kill them. Well then bring in the
necromancers. Just get right back to it.
Yeah, bring you back to life to torture you some more.
What a horrible existence that would be.
So this is, this stands as a comparison to the prior
comparison of Unix cut purses, pirates and necromancers.
Now we have torturers and necromancers, these all these
different pairings here. So beneath the city, that's
extra creepy, though. This the city beneath the city
that makes up most of the city, 90% of it.
So much could go on down there. And I know that's what George is
intending with this. He's like, what could be
happening deep down in those dark underground places,
catacombs, buried dead, hidden tombs and hidden arcane
experiments, especially the necromantic sort.
Yeah, you better believe it, friends.
That's what's going on in the affair.
Assuming any of this is remotely accurate.
And we don't have much reason to think otherwise.
And Guy used to be a much larger and more powerful Kingdom.
It's shrunk over time by the Jogo's nigh.
I can't imagine why. And they're like, yeah, let's
destroy that place that's a haunt of necromancers and
torturers. I'm sure they're cool with that.
Yeah, maybe if you exported some decent things or had a better
reputation that Jogos Naya wouldn't mess with you so much
that it might still. But I'm not cheering.
I'm cheering to Jogos nigh on in this example.
Take down those torturers and necromancers, will you?
To close things out, let's look at a few aspects of all this
from a higher level. In terms of a recurring form of
magic throughout the world, it's pretty common in terms of a, a
thing that's rumored or talked about, even if it's just a small
minority in a lot of these places, that just really draws a
lot of attention for a world that George keeps kind of low
magic. There's a lot of necromancy and
necromancers. And, and I think that's because
it's this thing that I said at the beginning, it's a conflict
magic. It's conflict sorcery.
It creates conflict both with the users and the people around
it that are affected by it. It, it's the cost that George
associates with it is moral, ethical and social.
Again, I talked before like necromancers don't have like
friends. That's an antisocial thing to do
morally, ethically. Well, that's part of why people
don't want to associate with you.
It's, it's, it's troubling, it's dark, it's potentially very
evil. Like it's, it's a concept we we
introduced at the beginning. Like where are the good
necromancers? They don't really exist if
they're they're only people that occasionally use necromancy for
good in extreme circumstances, which we've had several examples
of maybe throughout the this this episode, since some of
these are are not fully played out, that's why I have to throw
the maybe in there. So as much as George doesn't
love the former, which is, you know, telekinetics and lightning
bolts and fireballs, things like that, he loves this stuff where
it's it's magic that puts the human heart in conflict with
itself or it's the undead heart in conflict because someone else
is in control. I don't know.
It's, it's hard to explain, isn't it?
And given that magic seems to ebb and flow in the world and
that we're in a peak or entering a peak, we might see more
necromantic magic, we might see it work better.
We might see Kyburn's success built on by other people.
Other people might try this. And it's like, well, now this is
going to work. Thoros is accidentally raising
the dead. What other accidents and
mistakes and oops, wow that works kind of things will happen
in places elsewhere in the world.
That might explain the others returning at all.
Is it a chicken and egg thing while the others returning is
part of why magic returned? Or is the returning of magic
that's helping to bring the others back and and their
associated magics? If the others are back, then so
are is their necromancy their version of it?
Yeah. Thoros accidentally wielding
great power and that power passed on by its recipient.
These are these are strange times that even the characters
in world don't know entirely how to wrestle with it all.
So it's neat how George has kept necromancy prominent on the
fringes of the world, far away in places like Asha and Nephair,
but very consistently. Which I think is great set up
for the rest of the story in which it seems to be popping up
all over with the others, with the Ironborn, with relorists,
and maybe even with the the children of the forest and, and
with cold hands and things like that.
So to think that there might even be more versions of undead
magic of necromancy that we haven't even seen yet is
something we should consider. There may be enough already, but
there might be more. I mean with magic peaking, who
knows what other forms of magic or long gone forms of magic
might be around or return. People like Thoros might realize
they can do this. And they won't have Thoros's
restraint. Like Benero was all about it.
He's like, yeah, everybody's going to be alive again and
living the eternal summer. It's going to be great.
Thoros is the exception. He's like, I don't know about
that. So, yeah, there's got to be
places in the world of A Song of Ice and Fire that necromancy
happens that we don't know about.
The histories don't tell us because they've successfully
concealed it. Just as there are rumors that
may be unfounded, there are places that escaped scrutiny.
Maybe in a place like Lang or in Ye T.
Those weren't mentioned. Do they have necromancy in Ye T?
Probably, but it isn't mentioned.
It might be banned, it might be looked on differently, I don't
know. Definitely there's lots of magic
associated with that place, but this specific one has escaped
mention. But it's a good example of where
there could be more Cornish, James says.
So what the quote told me is the Lannisters have a habit of
falling foul of prophecies they've tried to avert.
Oh, yeah, very good. That's a great point.
We're referring back to the the prophecy of the hood of the
Morgon Bainfort, who said that the sons who killed him would
also die. Yeah, we got Cersei and the the
Valencar. And we also have maybe the
indirect one that's less about the Lannisters and more about
the Valyrians associated with the Lannisters, which is that
the gold of Castle Rock would be the Doom of Valyria.
So that's perhaps that's not the, that's maybe not quite
connected in the way you mean, but I thought of it.
Very good catch, Dornus Dame. As usual, our trivia question,
it was the prologue is the first time we see necromancy in
action. But who is the first person we
learn that's been accused of it? The answer is Kyburn.
Kyburn, of course. Good old Kyburn.
That old Kyburn. Yeah, I think I might have
mentioned it before, but I had an ex who had horrible
nightmares of Kyburn just picturing him and his
experiments. I get it.
Like, that dude's creepy. He's one of the creepiest there
is. Like the mad scientists
experimenting on people. Meanwhile, I've had nightmares
of the mountain of Gregor Clooney.
Both sides of it, right? Yeah, that's that's pretty
terrifying. So we mentioned a lot of our
previous episodes and there's probably more that I didn't
mention, but for sure our Hal Hal Lofsten episode, The Black
Bat of Harrenhal, Mel Young, Melisandre Thoros of Mir, The
Curious Case of Cold Hands, our third Bloodraven episode, which
deals with his life after going to the wall.
His early life is a lot less magical.
It's more black fire rebellion oriented.
But of course, those are good episodes too.
Of course, I mentioned our Ash Eye by the Shadow and the Shadow
by Ash Eye episodes. Great Empire, The Dawn.
We have the episode on Cohor. Like I said, probably some more
that I forgot to mention, but that's a lot.
That's a nice list. Check out any of those episodes
if you want to stay immersed. Thanks again to Nina.
Happy birthday again, Nina. Thanks to Joey Townsend for our
great intro music. Thanks to Michael Klarfeld for
our intro video and for the maps you see behind us.
You can get your own Claradox map, KLARADO x.de.
You can order the file and then go take it to a local printer
like a Kinko's or something like that, and they will make it in
whatever size you ask them to. It's fantastic.
Check it out and we'll be back not next week, but the week
after with another new episode. Well.
Next week for an exciting reason.
That's right, Ashaya's mother is getting married.
Yeah, on 4/20. On 4/20, we're going to Vegas.
Yeah, so. Anyway.
We'll be back. So we'll be back the week after
with more. You know what to do in the
meantime, Valar Riritis.