Ah, right, of course. If you think about it, you could indeed describe the invasion of the Others as ‘an invasion of burning blue stars,’ could you not? Sounds kinda like a meteor shower to me – but a very cold one. Essentially, what I am observing is that the Others and the fire dragons are perfect symbolic opposites of each other, hot and cold versions of falling star symbols. And don’t forget – they are both falling stars that come from moon symbols.

It seems to me that all of this symbolism here is indicative of two opposite types of moon children, and two opposite types of moons. Melisandre and Night’s queen parallel each other wonderfully as lunar queens with parallel shadow children, but no one would ever confuse a fire priestess and an ice priestess, and nobody would mistake an Other for a shadowbaby or a dragon. Fire and ice transformation seem to mirror each other, but they are not at all the same thing.  If you have been transformed into a being of living fire… well, you’re just a long way from being a walking popsicle, you know? For this reason, many in the ASOIAF community have come to refer to ice and fire as inverted parallels of one another – opposite, yet parallel. That’s why I called ice and fire the yin and yang of the story, and that’s a theme we will return to many times.

As we go, we will continue to see the pairing of fire magic with shadow, darkness, and the color black, and ice magic with brightness, light, and the color white. This is an important dynamic, and it runs through all things having to do with ice and fire magic. Essentially, this is a reflection of the state of the two moons. The fire moon has been transformed into black, darkness-bringing meteors, while the ice moon still shines brightly in the sky. In a future Moons of Ice and Fire episode, we will explore the physical locations that mirror the two moons and develop these ideas further, but I just want to draw attention to this concept as we are about to see quite a lot of it with the Others and the dragons.

Now the idea of the dragons and the Others as representing a kind of ice and fire duality has occurred to many people – it’s not exactly super esoteric or anything. True, it’s not a one-for-one comparison, because the Others seem to be basically human-like (perhaps transformed humans themselves), while the dragons are animals, although they may be rather intelligent ones. I for one think there might even be more perfect one-to-one analogs out there, such as ice dragons or some kind of fire-demon equivalent of the Others. Perhaps this is what will happen to Melisandre given enough time – she’ll finish transforming and become a being of pure fire, in other words. The red priests tattoo themselves in flames and wear robes of flames – what are they trying to imitate exactly?  Beings made of fire? And why do shadowbinders always wear those masks? For that matter, we may also may see an actual ice dragon, which would make a more exact correlation to the fire dragons that the Others would. I put the odds at about 51/49 in favor of the ice dragon making an appearance, for what it’s worth, though I may be overly optimistic.

However, I don’t think these differences should concern us here. We’ve never directly seen fire demons or ice dragons, while the Others and the fire-made-flesh dragons are central to the story and come up often in every book.  From a narrative perspective, the dragons and the Others are the important things. They are the primary avatars of ice and fire, and of the ice and fire moons – or at least, pieces of those moons.

For that matter, we can observe that from a symbolic perspective, Others and ice dragons are basically parallel symbols, as they both represent the idea of an icy meteor.

Going back to the very first episode of Mythical Astronomy, we have found several instances of the meteor shower of dragons being symbolically depicted as fallen stars or a thousand fires, such as this classic from Cressen’s prologue in ACOK:

Torches flickered along the walls of Dragonstone, and in the camp beyond, he could see hundreds of cookfires burning, as if a field of stars had fallen to the earth. Above, the comet blazed red and malevolent.

That one is of course great because Cressen is on Dragonstone and looking at the red comet as the meteor shower is implied. Then we have this gem from AGOT in the middle of Dany’s “wake the dragon” fever dream:

But it was not the plains Dany saw then.  It was King’s Landing and the great Red Keep that Aegon the Conqueror had built.  It was Dragonstone where she had been born.  In her mind’s eye they burned with a thousand lights, a fire blazing in every window. In her mind’s eye, all the doors were red.

Both of these quotes are about Dragonstone.  Dragonstone, a fortress of stone burnt black by dragon fire, is a great example of a city which serves as an analog to one of the moons – the fire moon, of course. It contains sleeping stone dragons and a thousand fires and as many red doors, all of which express the potential to produce the thousand thousand fiery dragon meteors. This is the place where Stannis’s Lightbringer was drawn from the fire, just as the fire moon is the place where the Lightbringer meteors emerge from. Stannis is a dark solar king, and Melisandre represents the fire moon, and when the fire moon joined up with the sun king in the same place, when they copulated, Lightbringer appeared. This is what Dragonstone represents – the birth of the dragon meteors, the falling red stars, and so we see symbolic depictions of the meteor shower here.

But up in the north we see a symbolic depiction of a meteor shower… but instead of a fiery one, it’s the cold version:

Outside, the night was white as death; pale thin clouds danced attendance on a silver moon, while a thousand stars watched coldly.

That was from the Varamyr Sixskins prologue of A Dance with Dragons, a chapter that ends with a shambling army of wights with pale blue star eyes marching along, with Thistle’s corpse now among their ranks. This sentence certainly evokes the Others, and in multiple ways. The phrase “white as death” makes you think of the white shadows that kill without mercy; in fact, change the word night to knight with a “k,” and you have knights that are white as death… the Others, who wear armor, ride horses, and wield swords, just like knights. A thousand stars watching coldly make you think of the cold blue star eyes of the Others, who are called “watchers” twice in the prologue of A Game of Thrones. Then we have pale thin clouds dancing, which reminds us of how the pale and thin Others are referred to as a cold mist – clouds, basically – and of how Ser Waymar Royce invites them to “dance with me” when he fights them.

In this one sentence, George is essentially painting a portrait of the Others in the sky – the pale thin dancing clouds are the bodies, and the cold stars watching are the eyes. The dancing clouds and cold star watchers attend the silver moon, almost as if it was some sort of icy queen. Which it is!

Essentially, the Others are just a cold version of the moon meteor shower. They are white shadows instead of black ones. For what it’s worth, meteors which fall through the earth’s atmosphere often appear blue due to atmospheric conditions, so an invasion of the Others really is like a meteor shower. A very cold shower, as it were.

You may recall that the first section of our very first episode was called “comets, dragons, and flaming swords,” and the very first thing I did in that section and in that essay was to spell out how all three of these things can symbolize one another. Comets and meteors can be seen as dragons or flaming swords, Dany’s dragons are like a flaming sword over the world, the dragons were born when the comet appeared, Arya compares Ned’s bloody sword to the red comet, Valyrian steel swords are made with dragonfire, and so on and so forth. Most importantly, comets, dragons and flaming swords are the main ingredients of the Azor Ahai legend and the prophecy of his return.

At the risk of repeating myself, I must again highlight the fact that all of these fiery symbols are associated with darkness, shadow, and the color black. The swords forged in dragonfire come out smoke-dark and nearly black; the shadowbabies of course are creatures smoke and darkness, “a shadow with a burning heart” as the Ghost of High Heart says; the black moon meteors brought on the darkness of the Long Night, and the biggest and baddest dragons are always the black ones, like Drogon “the winged shadow” who is so fond of blotting out the sun and causing mini eclipses and breathing actual black fire. All dragons have black bones and teeth, no matter the rest of their coloring, and those teeth are like black swords made of darkness and shadow.

As the saying goes, “comets, dragons, and flaming swords,” and always tied to darkness and the color black.

Well, today I am here to tell you that on the icy side of things, we have a similar thing going on, but inverted in terms of light and color. We have ice dragons and the white shadows known as the Others as an opposite of the dragons; we have frozen, glowing white magic swords and other white sword symbols as opposites of the black, dragon-forged magic swords; and of course we have a very famous white meteor, the “pale stone of magic powers” from which the white sword Dawn was made, as an opposite to the black meteor of the Bloodstone Emperor and the oily stone found at Asshai and elsewhere.

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A Tall Glass of Milk

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You may be asking yourself: did he just group Dawn, the ancestral sword of House Dayne, in with the Others and ice magic? Yes, absolutely, and this is one of the things I was alluding to in the title of this episode, “Dawn of the Others.” It’s a reference to both the the origins of the Others with the Night’s Queen, and also to the theory that Dawn is actually the original “Ice” of House Stark, a sword tied to ice magic and the Others. This is a theory I have mentioned in passing before, and it’s a theory other people – such as Voice of the First Men – have arrived at as well. I wasn’t the first to think of it, although I did come to this conclusion on my own before I started putting my theories up on Westeros.org back in early 2015. It’s kind of an intuitive thing at its most basic level – after all, what better name for a huge white sword than “Ice?”

Let’s quickly recap what we know about the history of House Stark and a sword called Ice, so that you can be clear about what I am proposing. This is from the second chapter of Game of Thrones, when Catelyn comes upon Ned cleaning Ice in the godswood.

 Catelyn had no love for swords, but she could not deny that Ice had its own beauty. It had been forged in Valyria, before the Doom had come to the old Freehold, when the ironsmiths had worked their metal with spells as well as hammers. Four hundred years old it was, and as sharp as the day it was forged. The name it bore was older still, a legacy from the age of heroes, when the Starks were Kings in the North.

Two important facts here: to the best of Catleyn’s knowledge, Ned’s Valyrian steel Ice is around 400 years old, but the Starks have been naming a sword “Ice” for thousands of years (the Age of Heroes is regarded as taking place before the Long Night, and thus at least 6,000 – 8,000 years ago according to the best Westerosi history we have). So when I say “original Ice,” I am talking about the very first sword that would have inspired the name. I’m saying it was the big white sword we now know as Dawn, that it was originally called Ice and that it was carried by a Stark. This would be the sword that subsequent Starks named their swords after.  At the end of this section we’ll come back to the logistics of this and talk about the possible sequence of events that could have lead to Ice being renamed Dawn and left with the Daynes and how any of this squares with the myths we have and all the rest.. but first, the symbolism.

As I was drafting various versions of these first few essays about the Others and trying to figure out the best order to present the ideas in, I found that I simply cannot talk about the Others for very long without talking about the “Dawn is original Ice” theory. This is because, as you’ll see, Dawn shares roughly 99.9% of its symbolism with the Others and ice magic. They are so tightly interwoven it’s impossible to separate them, quite frankly. It would be like me trying to explain dragons without referencing flaming swords or comets, and you all know I could never do that.

Put simply, the symbol of the white sword is to the Others what the black sword symbol is to dragons.

We’re all quite familiar with Valyrian steel – swords forged in dragon flame with the use of sorcery and quite possibly blood magic, which come out smoke-dark, almost black in color. As I’ve mentioned before, this dark coloring should not be, because the purest steel is light silver in color, and pure steel comes from having very high forge temperatures.  Dragonfire is extremely hot and Valyrian steel is the strongest in the world, and yet these swords and all Valyrian steel come out very dark – clearly, magic of some kind is the suspect here.

Whatever the cause, the point is that Martin has gone out of his way to make Valyrian steel smoke dark, and I believe the reason is simply that the dragons represent the children of the fire moon, and those children are black moon meteors which caused the Long Night.  Like the dragons themselves, the dragon swords are symbols of the the moon meteor dragons, and thus their description as smoke-dark is actually a great clue about what caused the Long Night – black meteors that looked like swords and threw up a ton of smoke into the air.

Valyrian steel swords are associated with darkness by more than just their general dark coloring. You’ll recall that Ned’s sword did that thing where it “drank the sun” from the intended crimson when Tobho Mott tried to color it and turned it a dark blood red, just as those moon dragons “drank the fire of the sun” and just as the greasy black stones of Asshai “drinks the light.”  The new swords made from Ned’s Ice ended up looking like “waves of night and blood,” which I’m sure you remember because I made a fairly big deal about that.

The penultimate Valyrian steel sword is Blackfyre, the ancestral sword of House Targaryen, which is named after the color of the fire of the black dragon infamously remembered as Balerion the Black Dread.  Another of my favorites is Nightfall, the sword of the Red Kraken Dalton Greyjoy, and of late, House Harlaw.

In short, Valyrian steel swords are dark blades that symbolize dark meteors, and they are associated with drinking up the sunlight and bringing darkness. Darkbringers, in other words.

And then we have Dawn, which TWOIAF tells us is basically white Valyrian steel:

The Daynes of Starfall are one of the most ancient houses in the Seven Kingdoms, though their fame largely rests on their ancestral sword, called Dawn, and the men who wielded it. Its origins are lost to legend, but it seems likely that the Daynes have carried it for thousands of years. Those who have had the honor of examining it say it looks like no Valyrian steel they know, being pale as milkglass but in all other respects it seems to share the properties of Valyrian blades, being incredibly strong and sharp.

Not only is Dawn white instead of black, it apparently glows a bit, according to the description we are given of Dawn quite consistently in the novels: “as pale as milkglass and alive with light.” Like I said, it’s a luminescent white meteor sword instead of smoky, light-drinking black meteor sword.

Now, with all that in mind, let’s take a look at the swords of the Others, which we see in the prologue of AGOT:

The Other slid forward on silent feet. In its hand was a longsword like none that Will had ever seen. No human metal had gone into the forging of that blade. It was alive with moonlight, translucent, a shard of crystal so thin that it seemed almost to vanish when seen edge- on. There was a faint blue shimmer to the thing, a ghost- light that played around its edges, and somehow Will knew it was sharper than any razor.

Like Dawn, the sword of the Other in this scene is pretty much the opposite of a light-drinking Valyrian steel sword – it’s a shimmering icy crystal blade giving off some kind of faint bluish glow. The “alive with moonlight” phrase basically just shoves the word ‘moon’ into Dawn’s “alive with light” description. I would say that is because the Others and their swords are meant to symbolize ice moon meteors, and the pale meteorite Dawn was made from seems like a similar symbol. As the action continues, the swords of the Others are twice described with the label “pale sword,” and are again implied to be glowing:

The pale sword came shivering through the air.
. . .
His blade was white with frost; the Other’s danced with pale blue light.
. . .
Swords rose and fell, all in a deathly silence. It was cold butchery. The pale blades sliced through ringmail as if it were silk.

The swords of Others are “alive with moonlight” in the last scene while Dawn is famously “alive with light.”  The Others’ swords are “pale swords” or “pale blades” which “dance with pale blue light,” while Dawn is “as pale as milkglass” and made from “a pale stone of magical powers,” and the white tower at Starfall where that pale stone was supposedly found has a tower named “The Palestone Sword.”  Pale swords, alive with light, carried by both the Sword of the Morning and the Others. And although it might be stating the obvious, Dawn and the Others both have falling star imagery – Dawn is made from the heart of a fallen star, and the Others are like an invasion of burning cold stars.

Now I want to be clear: I am not suggesting that Dawn is the exact same thing as an Other’s sword.  The Others’ swords are described as being translucent like crystal, while Dawn is never described as translucent, but rather as pale as milkglass, and though very shiny, actual milkglass tends to be opaque white. When they say that besides the color and glow, “it seems to share the properties of Valyrian blades,” it makes Dawn sound like some kind of metal, as opposed to just magical ice crystal. Also, Dawn is never described as being cold in Jaime’s POV where he remembered being knighted by Ser Arthur Dayne – he was actually cut a little bit by Dawn, if you recall, but feels no cold.

What I am saying is that Dawn and the swords of the Others share a lot of common symbolism, and that there may well be some icy connection, but they do not appear to be the same thing, in my opinion -although Voice of the First Men might disagree. Who knows? Maybe if an Other held Dawn it would become cold and appear translucent and glow blue. I don’t think I would complain if that happened – who wouldn’t get a thrill from an Other getting their hands on Dawn somehow? But for now, I just want to be clear about what I am proposing, which is that while Dawn and the swords of the Others do not seem to exactly the same physical substance, they share all the same symbolism, and I think this implies that Dawn has some link to ice magic and the Others.

We continue to find clues about Dawn lurking in the symbolism of the Others as we read about Sam Tarly’s confrontation with an Other in ASOS:

The Other slid gracefully from the saddle to stand upon the snow. Sword-slim it was, and milky white.

Curious… the Other itself is described as milky white and sword-like as it “slides from the saddle” like a sword sliding from its scabbard. We’ve seen a milky white sword somewhere before, haven’t we?

“And now it begins,” said Ser Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the Morning. He unsheathed Dawn and held it with both hands. The blade was pale as milkglass, alive with light.”

You saw that coming, right?  That classic was from A Game of Thrones, and the thing I’ll draw your attention to that the wielder of the milkglass-white sword is himself called a sword, the Sword of the Morning – he’s named after his own white sword, in other words. Compare that to the Other, who carries a pale sword and was described as being milky white and sword-like himself. Arthur Dayne and this Other here are both like milky white sword people with pale, alive-with-light swords, and both are associated with stars! They are pale swords and they wield pale swords, just as Azor Ahai reborn and his sword Lightbringer and his dragons are really all the same thing, just different ways of describing the moon meteors or the return of the red comet.

It’s also equivalent to the Black Brothers calling themselves “swords in the darkness” – the black brothers symbolize burning black meteors, and they themselves are thought of as swords. The Kingsguard too – they are sometimes called “the white swords” and live in the “White Sword Tower,” and that means Arthur Dayne was a white sword person twice over! We’ll talk more about the Kingsguard later in this episode.

So, Dawn is a milky white sword, and the Others are like milky white swords.  Dawn is as pale milkglass, and do you remember what we find when we look inside an Other?  That’s right, freaking milkglass.  This is from Storm, right after Sam stabs the Other and it begins to melt:

In twenty heartbeats its flesh was gone, swirling away in a fine white mist. Beneath were bones like milkglass, pale and shiny, and they were melting too.

Ah ha, that settles it!  Dawn is made from the femur of an Other!  Funny, but no – the Other’s bones melt away without the magic that animates them, so not very good for making swords.  But gods, this is tantalizing – the Others are milky white swords made of stuff that looks of milkglass.  Dawn is a milky white sword make of material that looks like milkglass. The Others have burning star eyes and Dawn is made from a fallen star.  What does it all mean?

Well, I think all of these clues are pointing at Dawn being the original Ice carried by an ancient Stark, and we’ll come back to that in a moment, but let’s consider the mythical astronomy angle first. The larger context of this exercise is to discuss the Others as a symbols of meteors from the ice moon, because that’s what they seem to be, and because it’s one of the main clues about there being an ice moon to begin with. Now the Others don’t actually come from the moon, just as dragons don’t actually come from the moon – the Others are the earthy symbolic representation of these hypothetical ice moon meteors, just as the dragons are for fire moon meteors.

But we also had actual fire moon meteors, as we’ve discussed, with the most concrete example being the black meteor that the Bloodstone Emperor worshiped during the Long Night (although I think the black meteors fell in a wide range across the planet, for what it’s worth). So if we have actual black dragon meteors, pieces of that burnt fire moon, might there be an actual ice moon meteor around somewhere?

How about the magical pale stone Dawn was made from?

This is, I believe, one of the main implications of Dawn and the Others having parallel symbolism, according to my hypothesis: the pale stone of magic powers that Dawn was made from was literally a piece of the ice moon. It would be a perfect opposite to the Bloodstone Emperor’s black meteor, which we believe to have come from the fire moon. In other words, I am suggesting that the Others symbolize ice moon meteors, and Dawn is an ice moon meteor.

Dawn is said to have been “forged from the heart of a fallen star,” and I am proposing that that star might have been the heart of the ice moon. Or maybe it’s fingernail clipping, or some frozen belly button lint. You get the point – it was a chip off the old icy block. This would be a good explanation for Dawn’s seeming link to ice magic. Remember that we have been given every indication that comets and meteors are probably magical in nature ASOIAF, and we’ll talk about this more in a future Moons of Ice and Fire episode.

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Ice Comes from the Moon

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So how did we get an ice moon fragment on Planetos? Well, the most straightforward explanation would be that when the fire moon blew up, some of those meteor fragments might have hit the ice moon, chipping off a nice icy meteor that fell from the sky along with all the black ones. Not only does appeal to our rational minds, because after all, if one moon in a two-moon system blew up, some shrapnel would surely strike the surviving moon, after all – but more importantly, I think there’s actually a ton of evidence for this. That’s going to be the subject of a future Moons of Ice and Fire episode, as a matter of fact, and it’s a theme we will come back to many times. I’ll be referring to this idea of black fire moon meteor shrapnel embedded in the ice moon as “the dragon locked in ice,” and it has a lot to do with Jon, as you will see.

It’s also possible the Dawn meteor comes from an even older moon collision event in the far distant past, before the Long Night, or perhaps even from the comet itself, pre-collision, but I think these are less likely. You know I follow the symbolism first and foremost, and Dawn has all the symbolism of an icy moon meteor… and of course Dawn is openly presented to us as being made from meteoric metal. Meteoric metal that just happens to resemble the shin-bone of a white walker, just saying.

There’s a huge clue about Dawn being an icy moon meteor chipped off by a fire moon meteor impact given to us in the form of the Temple of the moonsingers in Braavos. The Temple of the Moonsingers is really just one paragraph from AFFC, but again we find that it is one of those absolutely loaded passages. This is the son of the captain of the ship that takes Arya to Braavos, a boy named Denyo, playing tour guide to Arya as they arrive at the city:

“That is the Temple of the Moonsingers.” It was one of those that Arya had spied from the lagoon, a mighty mass of snow-white marble topped by a huge silvered dome whose milk-glass windows showed all the phases of the moon. A pair of marble maidens flanked its gates, tall as the Sealords, supporting a crescent-shaped lintel.

The Temple of the Moonsingers is explicitly stated as a moon temple, so we know it’s intended to serve as an analog to the moon if anything is. But there is no fire symbolism to be seen anywhere, no black stone, none of that. Instead, we find that it has snow-white marble, like many of castles and places that symbolize the ice moon, and it even has a silver dome. Silver is a color which can be used for ice or fire – think of Dany’s hair like molten silver – but it is always a moon color. Coupled here with the snow white marble and the milkglass moon-phase windows, it’s easy to see that the Temple of the Moonsingers is as obvious an ice moon symbol as you will find.

Wait, milkglass moon-phase windows? Some of those phases would be crescent moons, like sickles. Now in Bran’s all important greenseer training montage chapter in ADWD, the crescent moon is four times described as being “as thin and sharp as the blade of a knife,” so some of these moon phase windows on the temple of the Moonsingers would be… milkglass moon knives. Milkglass moon knives, which come from the icy moon temple. I am hoping you guys are picking up on the symbolism here!

The last thing I want to point out, and this is where the idea of a fire moon meteor striking the ice moon comes in, would be the pair of giant moon maidens holding up the crescent shaped lintel. This seems like a possible allusion to there having once been two moons – there are two giant moon maidens here, after all. And if a piece of the fire moon shrapnel happened to embed itself in the ice moon as I was proposing, then the ice moon would actually contain the corpse of the fire moon – some of it at least – and thus we should see two moon maidens in the ice moon, from a certain perspective.

We’ll be coming back to this idea in a major way in the next episode, so if you think I’m making too big a deal about the pair of moon maidens – maybe you just need two to hold up a lintel, right? – just absorb the snow white moon temple with milkglass moon windows and observe that the pairing of milkglass with ice symbolism and moon symbolism rears its head once again, just as it did with the Others and with Dawn.

I suppose I would be remiss if I didn’t mention a few supporting details form the moonsingers themselves. “Moonsinger” is the term give by the Jogos Nhai to their priestesses, and the Jogos Nhai, if you don’t know, are a nomadic horse people in the far, far east, something like the Dothraki only much shorter and they ride zebras – I mean zorses, zorses. What’s cool is that the moonsingers shave all the hair from their body – to make them better resemble moons, I suppose. Very occasionally males can be moonsingers, but they have to dress and act as women, so the Temple of the Moonsingers is explicitly female, even before we observe the stone moon maidens flanking the entrance.

Finally, moonsingers were amongst the Valyrian slaves who escaped Valyria and founded Braavos, and it was these moonsingers who saved everyone’s bacon by prophesying the location of Braavos, which was so foggy as to provide them cover from prowling dragonlords trying to find them from the air. That’s why the moonsingers have such a grand temple in Braavos – it’s the biggest of all the temples in the city, in fact. My point however is that the moonsingers that go to the ice moon milkglass temple are fighting against the dragonlords. Against the fire moon symbols.

Ok, so look. I have a ton of stuff to say about the Wall, and I’m saving most of that for a section when we can focus on it specifically, but I do have to tell you that the Wall is analogous to both Dawn and the swords of the Others, and it’s also perhaps the best symbol of the ice moon that exists. I’m going to save the full analysis and quote pulls for later, but we really do need to mention the sword symbolism, because it supports the idea the Dawn is a big icy sword.

First of all, when the Wall catches the sunlight, it shines, “alive with light,” just like Dawn and the swords of the Others – ah ha. It’s also described as “blazing blue and crystalline in the sunlight,” but still giving Jon the shivers when he looks at it, giving us the idea of a crystal blue sword, like the swords of the Others, or of a sword blazing with cold light or cold fire.

There’s a memorable line about the Wall being “a sword east of Castle Black, but a snake to the west.” On the surface, that’s a reference to how the Wall runs straight on level ground to the east, but runs rather crookedly to the west, due to all the hills and mountains. But we can see this as the Wall being labelled a snake sword – an icy snake sword that is alive with light. Even better, when Jon walks through the tunnel beneath the Wall, he describes it as being as “cold as the belly of an ice dragon and as twisty as a serpent.” It’s an ice dragon sword, alive with light.

And if that isn’t enough, there’s a really cool scene where Jon and Stannis are standing over a map of Westeros and arguing about manning the various castles on the Wall, and when Jon starts talking about “I am the sword in the darkness and the watcher on the walls,” Stannis actually pulls out his fake Lightbringer and lays it down on the map, right along the Wall. It’s almost as if to say, “the Wall is Lightbringer,” which makes sense. It’s definitely easy to see the Wall as the shield that guards the realms of men, another part of the Night’s Watch vows, but we also just saw that it’s an alive with light ice dragon sword too. Jon periodically thinks to himself, “the Wall is mine,” and indeed, Jon might look good with with an alive-with-light ice dragon sword, the one which we know as Dawn but which I am claiming may have been the original “Ice,” perhaps once wielded by a Stark like Jon.

You’ll have to pardon my flair for the dramatic there, but it’s really pretty simple; we’re just going on the descriptions Martin is giving us. The Wall is like a sword, and it’s alive with light, but it’s made of ice and compared to an ice dragon. That’s exactly how I have been describing Dawn, again, based on the symbolism we are being given: Dawn is an alive-with-light ice dragon sword that may, in some sense, be Lightbringer.

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Ice Dragon Steel

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The idea about Dawn having once been the original Ice of House Stark should actually not be controversial at all. Think about it, and set aside all my mythical astronomy stuff for a moment and just think about some of the popular speculation in the fandom that has been around for years. Many people think Dawn has something to do with the myth of “Lightbringer” and / or the last hero’s blade of “dragonsteel.” A strange, glowing magic sword named Dawn which is associated with the morning could is obviously a strong contender to be Lightbringer and / or the “dragonsteel” of the last hero, the two swords remembered as playing a role in ending the Long Night. Assuming Dawn is indeed forged from a meteorite, then it could well be regarded as dragonsteel, because meteors can be perceived as dragons, as we well know.

Another thing that many people think is that the last hero was a Stark, and Old Nan says the Night’s King was a Stark too for that matter. We don’t know for sure if the last hero was a Stark, but it’s certainly a strong possibility, and that’s my point: the last hero might have been a Stark, and the last hero’s dragonsteel might have been Dawn. So the notion of Dawn having once been called Ice when in the hands of an ancient Stark really isn’t all that strange. It’s something we have to consider.

If all of this came together the right way and Dawn is made from an icy meteorite, that would make Dawn an ice dragon sword. Ice-dragon-steel, if you will, in the hands of a Stark last hero. And doesn’t that sound badass. It has to be true!

If you prefer a more twisted interpretation, imagine this ‘ice dragon sword’ in the hands of a Stark Night’s King. Winter is coming, right?! Some think the Night’s King and the last hero were the same person anyway, and I would think they are related at the least. You guys know I like the idea of a magic sword duel with a black and white sword, so maybe the last hero had a black, dragon forged blade and Night King had the giant white sword that glows like milkglass.

If Dawn was the original Ice of House Stark, one of the big questions floating out there is the question of how it got to Starfall and came to be carried by House Dayne. As we all know, ASOIAF is packed with events in the main story which mirror those of the past, and the Tower of Joy is one of the most important events of the story. Lyanna Stark, she of the blue winter rose, is a signature icy moon maiden, and she died giving birth at the Tower of Joy, which makes the Tower of Joy a symbol of icy moon impregnation and ice dragon birth. I’ve referred to Jon as a kind of ice dragon many times, because of his RLJ lineage, so that fits.

And what happened after the fight at the Tower of Joy? Ned, who represents the King of Winter archetype, carried Dawn to Starfall. Not only is this another symbol of an ice moon meteor emerging form the Tower of Joy – Dawn in this case – but I also can’t help but wonder whether this might be an echo of the past, when, for reasons unknown, the King of Winter took his white sword, once called Ice, to Starfall, leaving it there under the care of House Dayne.

Ned, of course, keeps a smoke-dark, dragon-forged sword back at Winterfell, so there may be an implied “sword-swapping” in the past where a white sword is taken south and a black one taken north, presumably to fight the Others. We generally think of the events of the War for the Dawn as taking place in the North, but I think there is also a set of events in the south revolving around Battle Isle, where the ancient dragonlords from Asshai seem to have built a fused stone fortress. Perhaps there was a confrontation with Azor Ahai / the Bloodstone Emperor there, one which went down before the final fight with the Others, one which involved sword swapping.

The Hightowers of Oldtown built their famous tower on top of the fused stone fortress, and I find the sigil of House Hightower most intriguing: “A white tower crowned with flames on smoke grey.” Their words are “we light the way” – so that’s a flaming white tower that lights the way at a time when the air was filled with smoke… very intriguing, indeed.

As we discussed in our Great Empire of the Dawn and House Dayne episodes with History of Westeros, House Dayne and House Hightower are two of the Houses most likely to have been founded by travelers from the Great Empire of the Dawn, and they both built white towers on islands at the mouth of a river, and they both have similar light-bringing symbolism. All the evidence points to Azor Ahai invading Westeros at Oldtown, where his culture had built the black, fused stone fortress on Battle Isle, so it’s definitely noteworthy to see the white tower symbolism and the light-bringing symbolism that reminds us of House Dayne here as well. It speaks of conflict, as does the name Battle Isle.

I can’t resist busting out one of my house sigil symbolism nuggets, one squirreled away for quite some time. Behold the sigil of House Farring:  two knights combatant crossing swords counterchanged, purple and white. In other words, a white knight with a white sword on a purple field on the left half, and a purple knight with a purple sword on a white field on the right side. There’s a hard dividing line down the middle, and where the swords cross over the center line, they switch colors. The white sword’s tip turns purple, and vise versa.

The reason why any of this is relevant though is because when Stannis sticks his fake Lightbringer into the sand on the beach of Dragonstone after drawing it from the fire, it is picked up by two people, one of which is the son of Ser Davos Seaworth, and the other a member of House Farring:

By the time the song was done, only charwood remained of the gods, and the king’s patience had run its course. He took the queen by the elbow and escorted her back into Dragonstone, leaving Lightbringer where it stood. The red woman remained a moment to watch as Devan knelt with Byren Farring and rolled up the burnt and blackened sword in the king’s leather cloak. The Red Sword of Heroes looks a proper mess, thought Davos.

Lightbringer is a blackened sword – that’s something I’ve pointed out before as evidence of my theory that Azor Ahai made his Lightbringer from the black meteor in the Bloodstone Emperor story. But the people who pick up Lightbringer have interesting symbolism: House Seaworth has the black ship and the white onion which looks like a moon in the sky, and House Farring has this white and purple swordsman thing going on.

At the most basic level, I think the sigil of House Farring implies that we should be thinking about two important swords – two Lightbringer swords, but opposite in nature, as I have proposed since the very beginning. It’s easy to see how the purple sword in the Farring sigil could stand in for a black sword, since purple is the color of the eyes of dragon-blooded people. The counterchanged nature of the design – the fact that the swords swap colors – might be a clue about the sword swap idea I proposed.

That might be why, way  up north, the icy Starks have a black sword forged in dragonfire, and why  we find the Daynes in possession of the white sword symbolic of all things ice, even though they live in southernmost part of Westeros near the edge of the Dornish desert and even though they seem to descend from the ancestors of the Valyrians who came from Asshai. Heck, even the song “The Dornishman’s Wife” say that “the Dornishman’s blade was made of black steel, and it’s kiss was a terrible thing.” The Dornish Daynes really should not have the big white sword, but rather a black dragon sword like Ned’s. The white sword that resembles white walker bones is rather conspicuously out of place there, but it would make a ton of sense if we had seen someone named the King of Winter holding it and calling it Ice… and maybe once, people saw that very thing… which might have been the last thing they saw.

We’ll come back to trying to piece together these long-ago events of the War for the Dawn in the future as we uncover more symbolism, but for now, you can see why it is very tempting to look for the link between Dawn and ice magic. In fact, you can, in a manner of speaking, find Dawn by looking north, and north..

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Dawn of the North

This section is sponsored by, appropriately, Ser Imriel Jordayne of Heavenly House Orion, earthly avatar of the Sword of the Morning and spinner of the great wheel, and by Direliz, the Alpha Patron, descendant of Gilbert of the Vines and earthly avatar of Aquarius the Water-Bearer

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Finally he looked north. He saw the Wall shining like blue crystal, and his bastard brother Jon sleeping alone in a cold bed, his skin growing pale and hard as the memory of all warmth fled from him. And he looked past the Wall, past endless forests cloaked in snow, past the frozen shore and the great blue-white rivers of ice and the dead plains where nothing grew or lived. North and north and north he looked, to the curtain of light at the end of the world, and then beyond that curtain. He looked deep into the heart of winter, and then he cried out, afraid, and the heat of his tears burned on his cheeks.

That was, of course, from Bran’s coma dream in AGOT. That curtain of light is almost certainly the aurora borealis, a Latin phrase which translates to “dawn of the north.” And George R. R. Martin chose to speak of these lights, the dawn of the north, in the same breath as the terrifying heart of winter. We also got a glimpse of Jon the ice dragon, sleeping and growing cold in the ice of the Wall. But seriously – Dawn of the North!

The Aurora Borealis makes one other appearance in ASOIAF folklore, and it comes to us in TWOIAF in the section describing the Shivering Sea, which is north of Essos and serves as the equivalent to the Arctic Ocean here on Earth:

Sailors, by nature a gullible and superstitious lot, as fond of their fancies as singers, tell many tales of these frigid northern waters. They speak of queer lights shimmering in the sky, where the demon mother of the ice giants dances eternally through the night, seeking to lure men northward to their doom. They whisper of Cannibal Bay, where ships enter at their peril only to find themselves trapped forever when the sea freezes hard behind them.

Moons can be seen as goddesses, and the “demon mother of the ice giants” sounds like a fantastic name for the goddess of the ice moon. Those ice giants would be the icy moon meteors, of course, and this section of TWOIAF also happens to be the one where we the full description of the ice dragon, because those are also supposedly seen here near the dancing curtain of light / demon mother of the ice giants.  These “queer lights shimmering in the sky” is another clear reference to the Aurora Borealis, the dawn of the north. Is there any sensible link between the idea of Dawn as an icy sword from the north and idea of the demon mother of the ice giants? Well, yes, when you think of the icy demon mother as a symbol of the ice moon, and Dawn as a icy moon meteor, an ice dragon.

I’ll also point out that Aurora, the Latin word for dawn, is the name of a Roman goddess of the dawn, who is Eos in Greek myth. In George’s mind, it seems that when a dawn goddess appears in the north, she becomes the demon mother of the ice giants.

Next up, we have Jon, Mr. Ice Dragon himself, gets a glimpse of “Dawn” while he’s in the North:

The eastern sky was pink near the horizon and pale grey higher up. The Sword of the Morning still hung in the south, the bright white star in its hilt blazing like a diamond in the dawn, but the blacks and greys of the darkling forest were turning once again to greens and golds, reds and russets. And above the soldier pines and oaks and ash and sentinels stood the Wall, the ice pale and glimmering beneath the dust and dirt that pocked its surface.

Notice the ice of the Wall is pale and glimmering right after the white star in the hilt of the Sword of the Morning constellation is blazing like a diamond in the dawn. This is simply more paralleling of the Wall and Dawn, the Sword of the Morning.

Does this foreshadow Jon becoming the new Sword of the Morning, in some sense? It seems possible. That might happen even if he doesn’t get his hands on Dawn – the main thing you have to do to win this title in the most meaningful sense is to literally help to end a Long Night and win a War for the Dawn, both of which I believe are on Jon’s to-do list. He’s already got the Wall, which is the biggest ice dragon sword this side of a frozen moon meteor.

For those who are fans of one of our beloved heroes wielding Dawn, yet are perplexed at the lack of Dayne main characters available to wield it, the “Dawn is the Original Ice of House Stark” theory may be the answer. Aziz from History of Westeros and I speculated that perhaps Darkstar will steal Dawn as a way of getting it out into the fray, only to end up in the hands of Jon when the time is right. Jon’s Stark heritage from his ice queen mother, Lyanna, might give Jon an even better claim to the sword than Arthur Dayne himself – if indeed this giant white sword was originally called Ice.

This is the opinion of Voice of the First Men, as well as another forum friend by the name of SlyWren who wrote a really nice essay about Jon’s connection to Sword of the Morning symbolism that you can read here. She’s been talking about Jon as the Sword of the Morning for a long time, so I have to give her her due. In particular, SlyWren believes that this scene where Jon sees the Sword of the Morning constellation foreshadows Jon as the new Sword of the Morning, an idea which has obvious appeal.

There are some other great clues about Jon being the Sword of the Morning and possibly wielding Dawn. Consider his sword, Longclaw: although the blade is dark Valyrian steel, the white wolf’s head pommel is made of “pale stone,” the same phrase used to describe the Dawn meteor. Jon has a pale stone sword, just saying. It’s interesting that both Longclaw and Ned’s Ice can seem to symbolize either an icy white sword or a black dragon sword. Both are black, dragon-forged Valyrian steel, but Jon’s has the pale stone pommel and Ned’s is called Ice and possibly named after an older white sword made from a pale stone. Thus it is hard to say which sword – the black or the white – belongs in the hands of the King of Winter or the last hero.

As we discussed in the Sacred Order of Green Zombies series, Longclaw is described as shining with “morning light” twice in one chapter – the one where Jon executes Janos Slynt in true Ned Stark fashion. Here’s the first scene, at the beginning of the chapter, and notice the Ned-ness that saturates this bit:

Half the morning passed before Lord Janos reported as commanded. Jon was cleaning Longclaw. Some men would have given that task to a steward or a squire, but Lord Eddard had taught his sons to care for their own weapons. When Kegs and Dolorous Edd arrived with Slynt, Jon thanked them and bid Lord Janos sit.

That he did, albeit with poor grace, crossing his arms, scowling, and ignoring the naked steel in his lord commander’s hands. Jon slid the oilcloth down his bastard sword, watching the play of morning light across the ripples, thinking how easily the blade would slide through skin and fat and sinew to part Slynt’s ugly head from his body. All of a man’s crimes were wiped away when he took the black, and all of his allegiances as well, yet he found it hard to think of Janos Slynt as a brother. There is blood between us. This man helped slay my father and did his best to have me killed as well.

Then at the end of that same Jon chapter when he actually executes Janos, something similar happens:

The smile that Lord Janos Slynt smiled then had all the sweetness of rancid butter. Until Jon said, “Edd, fetch me a block,” and unsheathed Longclaw.

By the time a suitable chopping block was found, Lord Janos had retreated into the winch cage, but Iron Emmett went in after him and dragged him out. “No,” Slynt cried, as Emmett half-shoved and halfpulled him across the yard. “Unhand me … you cannot … when Tywin Lannister hears of this, you will all rue—”

Emmett kicked his legs out from under him. Dolorous Edd planted a foot on his back to keep him on his knees as Emmett shoved the block beneath his head. “This will go easier if you stay still,” Jon Snow promised him. “Move to avoid the cut, and you will still die, but your dying will be uglier. Stretch out your neck, my lord.”

The pale morning sunlight ran up and down his blade as Jon clasped the hilt of the bastard sword with both hands and raised it high. “If you have any last words, now is the time to speak them,” he said, expecting one last curse.

The first time we saw Ned Stark, he was cutting someone’s head off. The trademark pose of the Kings of Winter has them sitting on a throne with a bared sword across their lap, a sign which warns of hostility and denial of guest right. There’s a message here: the King of Winter is a hard man. He’s an executioner. He carries out hard justice, and he does it with just Ice, ha ha. I kid, but my point is that Jon is doing a quintessential Ned Stark impression in this chapter where his sword shines with morning light… twice.

There are only two other instances of a sword shining with morning light, and one of those is when Joffrey holds aloft Widows Wail at his wedding, only hours before he dies. Joffrey is no Stark, but Widow’s Wail is one half of what used to be Ned’s Valyrian steel Ice. But again, it’s black dragon steel, so we still cannot say whether the true sword of the morning should be a black one or a white one.

The other example of a sword with Morning Light definitely points back to the King of Winter. This is Robb, the first time we see him in ACOK after being crowned King in the North, which is basically just a more modern title for “King of Winter” – Mage Mormont shouts out “King of Winter” while everyone else is shouting “King in the North” as Robb is proclaimed king, if you recall. So here’s King Robb, receiving Ser Cleos Frey, who is a prisoner of war, with a bared sword across his lap and a direwolf at his side, the traditional pose of the Kings of Winter:

When the guards brought in the captive, Robb called for his sword. Olyvar Frey offered it up hilt first, and her son drew the blade and laid it bare across his knees, a threat plain for all to see. “Your Grace, here is the man you asked for,” announced Ser Robin Ryger, captain of the Tully household guard. “Kneel before the king, Lannister!” Theon Greyjoy shouted. Ser Robin forced the prisoner to his knees.

“Rise, Ser Cleos.” Her son’s voice was not as icy as his father’s would have been, but he did not sound a boy of fifteen either. War had made a man of him before his time. Morning light glimmered faintly against the edge of the steel across his knees.

That’s the King of Winter personified in Robb, with morning light glimmering on his blade. Needless to say, this may be a clue that the original sword of the King of Winter was the one now known as the Sword of the Morning. Here’s a quick refresher on the language used for those stone Kings of Winter in the crypts of Winterfell, from one of Ned’s dreams in AGOT:

He was walking through the crypts beneath Winterfell, as he had walked a thousand times before. The Kings of Winter watched him pass with eyes of ice, and the direwolves at their feet turned their great stone heads and snarled.

Stone Kings of Winter with eyes of ice, aye? Again I say they might look good with the icy-looking sword made from a pale stone, as Robb indicates with his chilly voice, King of Winter crown, and that morning light glimmering on his sword. Once again we see that the King of Winter role is one of stern judgement.

Robb does the King of Winter pose one other time, when Tyrion swings back by Winterfell on his way back from the Wall. Tyrion recalls the encounter later in ACOK:

Tyrion could hear the rumble of the foemen’s drums now. He remembered Robb Stark as he had last seen him, in his father’s high seat in the Great Hall of Winterfell, a sword naked and shining in his hands.

No morning light, but it’s still a shining sword in the King of Winter’s lap, so I thought I would mention it.

Now that chapter at Riverrun with Robb sitting enthroned as King in the North and receiving Ser Cleos is Catelyn’s first in ACOK. Check out the opening of the second Catleyn chapter, as it has more clues about Dawn and the cold King of Winter:

As she slept amidst the rolling grasslands, Catelyn dreamt that Bran was whole again, that Arya and Sansa held hands, that Rickon was still a babe at her breast. Robb, crownless, played with a wooden sword, and when all were safe asleep, she found Ned in her bed, smiling.

Sweet it was, sweet and gone too soon. Dawn came cruel, a dagger of light.

With Dawn comes the realization that Robb has been crowned the King in the North, which, again, is just a modern form of the older “King of Winter” title. We see that Dawn is cruel, and it’s a dagger of light – the opposite of the daggers of darkness dragon’s teeth we saw earlier, or of the shadowsword the shadowbaby version of Stannis carried. It may well be that Dawn, the glowing milkglass sword, is a dagger of light which belongs in the hands of the King of Winter, just as the curtain of light which guards the Heart of Winter is the Dawn of the North.

After all, there IS magic north of the Wall, as Jon sees on his very first journey beyond it:

He woke to the sight of his own breath misting in the cold morning air. When he moved, his bones ached. Ghost was gone, the fire burnt out. Jon reached to pull aside the cloak he’d hung over the rock, and found it stiff and frozen. He crept beneath it and stood up in a forest turned to crystal. 

The pale pink light of dawn sparkled on branch and leaf and stone. Every blade of grass was carved from emerald, every drip of water turned to diamond.  Flowers and mushrooms alike wore coats of glass. Even the mud puddles had a bright brown sheen. Through the shimmering greenery, the black tents of his brothers were encased in a fine glaze of ice. So there is magic beyond the Wall after all.

“Lord Snow?” he heard. Soft and meek. He turned.

So there is magic beyond the Wall – and it’s the magic of a cold dawn, which coats everything in ice that looks like glass. The frozen blades of grass are “carved,” which makes me think of a carved, icy milkglass blade, or a carved icy crystal blade, and the frozen water drops are now diamonds – this is a direct parallel being drawn between ice and diamonds, like the white diamond star in the hilt of the Sword of the Morning constellation. We also see an ice-coated flower that “wears a coat of glass,” which reminds of us blue winter roses which grow in the glass gardens of Winterfell, a favorite of Lyanna Stark as we know. Indeed, the entire forest is turned to crystal, and of course the swords of the Others look like crystal, as does the Wall. Ice and crystal are interchangeable symbols in ASOIAF, in other words, and we will expand on that in future episodes when we look at the Wall and the Sept of Baelor and other icy places.

Even the black tents of the black brothers are encased in ice, as is Jon’s black cloak. I believe this is showing us that the black brother symbolize black ice, which, again, refers to Ned’s black Valyrian steel sword named Ice (black Ice) and to dragonglass, which is black frozen fire – black ice. Valyrian steel and dragonglass are what the black brothers need to fight the Others, and when Jon dreams of defending the Wall against the forces of the North with a burning red blade, he is “armored in black ice.” So, black ice is a great symbol for the Black Brothers, the black swords in the darkness who fight the Others with frozen fire, and this means that this magical scene in the cold morning air sets up the battlefield – black frozen fire brothers versus the pale icy Others whose eyes burn like cold stars. Frozen fire, burning ice – we’ll talk about this more in the future.

But the thing I want you to take away here is that the icy magic north of the Wall comes with a cold dawn. And with it comes Gilly, calling Jon “Lord Snow” and asking him to help save her baby. From what, Jon asks?

“The cold gods,” she said. “The ones in the night. The white shadows.”

Right. Jon and Gilly’s entire conversation about the Others  and icy transformation of humans into white shadows comes during this magical icy cold dawn, just before the sun fully rises. When it does, Gilly flees, as does the icy magic, and then the party is over:

Jon watched her go, his joy in the morning’s brittle beauty gone.  (. . .) The magic was already faded, icy brightness turning back to common dew in the light of the rising sun.

Melting away like the Others, the icy brightness of dawn. The talk of the Others came with the cold dawn magic, and disappeared when the sun came out, leaving only Jon. When Jon first woke and saw this icy dawn brightness, he thinks of it as the magic north of the Wall – but we know the main form of magic north of the Wall is the Others and the terrifying Heart of Winter.. and so fittingly, Jon and Gilly talk about the Others. But if Dawn is the original Ice, the “Dawn of the North” if you will, then it too is “the magic north of the Wall,” and it is the cold dawn light shining on the icy coats of glass which Jon labels northern magic.

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Time Out for Speculation

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Let me offer a bit of speculation based on what we’ve explored so far. If Valyrian steel kills the Others, as it most probably does, and if Dawn is the original Ice of House Stark and has some connection to ice magic, is it possible that Dawn, or “original Ice” I guess we can call it, has some magical ability to kill dragons? perhaps that’s too much symmetry, but it would answer the question of why the King of Winter might leave it in the south in the hands of the Daynes. Starfall is very close to Oldtown, the place which all signs point to as being the location of Azor Ahai’s invasion of Westeros. Perhaps the idea is to have dragonglass and later, Valyrian steel, at the Wall and at Winterfell, ready to kill the Others if they should come prowling… and in the south, it’s good to have a dragon-killer sword ready in case those dragonlords come again. The TV show gave their version of the Night King an icy weapon that can kill dragons, and perhaps Dawn is that something in the books. Just a crazy idea though, I wouldn’t put any money on it.

I have long thought that if the Hightowers and Daynes descend from the Great Empire of the Dawn, they were probably what I would call “Amethyst Empress loyalists,” meaning that they turned again the evil Bloodstone Emperor – whom I think was also Azor Ahai, the King of the Long Night. They would be dragon people fighting on team Westeros, and this might explain the Daynes and Hightowers in general, and would explain why they would be entrusted with a dragon-killing weapon, if that’s what Dawn is. The Hightowers at the very least may have been involved in helping to kill off the Targaryen dragons during the Dance of the Dragons civil war according to some speculation, and the most ancient legends have the first Hightowers exterminating actual winged dragons who they found roosting on the mysterious fused stone fortress. Those Hightowers might be dragon-exterminators, in other words.

Or perhaps the hypothetical sword swapping is precautionary. Maybe the idea is to keep the milkglass sword as far away from the King of Winter or the Night’s King or just the Others in general, because Dawn in the hands of such would be unstoppable. Perhaps that’s why only worthy knights can carry it, and no one else. We’ll be coming back to that scene at the Tower of Joy a few times in this series, as it it just seems loaded with import.

Alright, let’s get back to the subject of white swords, Dawn, and the Others. By now we’ve gotten our feet wet in this chilly pond of symbolism, but believe me, it gets worse. And by worse, I mean that our socks are wet and cold and we don’t have any towels or a fresh pair of socks and it really sucks and… oh, no, I mean it gets worse in that we’re about to crack open one of the most ridiculous bits of symbolism I have found anywhere in ASOIAF, one which I’ve never actually heard anyone talk about. It’s so obvious, you will be stunned you didn’t see it yourself when I show it to you, I promise.

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The White Sword Brothers

This final section is brought to you by three acolytes of the Church of Starry Wisdom: Arande Nim, spearwife of the Red Mountains and secret witness to the Tower of Joy; Mallory Sand, Storm Witch, Rider of Zulfric the Black Beast; and Greenfoot the Gorgeous

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A moment ago, I mentioned that the Kingsguard are sometimes called “the white swords,” and in fact their home base is called “The White Sword Tower.” That’s especially funny when it comes to Arthur Dayne, because before he joined the Kingsguard, Arthur was already a person referred to as white sword, because he bears the title “the Sword of the Morning” (meaning  that he is named after the white sword known as Dawn), and he already lived in a tower named after a white sword, the Palestone Sword tower at Starfall. Then he went to King’s Landing and became a white sword in a second sense – a Kingsguard – and lived in another tower named after a white sword – the White Sword Tower. Why the redundant white sword symbolism for Arthur? What is George saying to us here?

The answer is that awesome bit of symbolism I just hyped up, which is this: the Kingsguard are being used as a symbolic proxy for the Others, throughout all the books. We see the Others on page very seldom, but we see the Kingsguard a lot and they usually seem to be playing the role of the Others. It’s pretty startling when you look at all their descriptions one after another… which is what we’ll do.

By now we are well familiar with the “white shadow” symbolism of the Others – in total, the Others are referred to as white shadows at least four, possibly five times (one is ambiguous), beginning with the prologue of AGOT where we first see them. Interestingly, the Kingsguard are called white shadows on four separate occasions (that’s including Ser Barristan, who still wears his white Kingsguard armor), and twice more they are called “pale shadows.”

The only other being labelled a white shadow is Ghost, who gets the white shadow moniker on three occasions and the pale shadow once, and there’s one occasion of an ice-encrusted weirwood tree being called a pale shadow.  I think Ghost and weirwood trees do both play in to the symbolic mystery of the white shadows, and we know Ghost himself is explicitly stated by Jon to be a parallel of the weirwoods, but let’s focus on the Kingsguard and the Others for now.

In ACOK, Tyrion looks at Joffrey and thinks:

His two white shadows were always with him; Balon Swann and Mandon Moore, beautiful in their pale plate.

Recall that George describes the Others as ‘beautiful’ in interviews. Earlier in ACOK, Tyrion observes Joffrey again:

Joffrey was galloping at his side, whey-faced, with Ser Mandon Moore a white shadow on his left.

At the Battle of the Blackwater, on the bridge of ships, a fallen Tyrion looks up at Ser Mandon:

Finally he rolled over the side and lay breathless and exhausted, flat on his back. Balls of green and orange flame crackled overhead, leaving streaks between the stars. He had a moment to think how pretty it was before Ser Mandon blocked out the view. The knight was a white steel shadow, his eyes shining darkly behind his helm.

That’s a nice one because the streaks of fire between the stars implies a meteor shower, and then we get the white shadow Ser Mandon, his eyes shining darkly. The way the sky is blocked out when the white shadow appears reminds us of the Long Night, of course, when the sun, moon, and stars would have been hidden, and I think that’s when the Others invaded, if my memory serves me right.

It’s a similar white shadow routine with Dany and Ser Barristan in ADWD:

Dany glimpsed Ser Barristan sliding closer, a white shadow at her side.

Here’s Barristan again, meeting with Skahaz the Shavepate inthe dark corridors of the Great Pyramid of Meereen in ADWD:

A pale shadow and a dark, the two conspirators came together in the quiet of the armory on the Great Pyramid’s second level, amongst racks of spears, sheaves of quarrels, and walls hung with trophies from forgotten battles.

“Tonight,” said Skahaz mo Kandaq. The brass face of a blood bat peered out from beneath the hood of his patchwork cloak. “All my men will be in place. The word is Groleo.”

The dark shadow is a blood bat, an excellent symbol for dark Lightbringer and the waves of blood and night motif that defines it, with the brass working to imply a dim sun or dark sun. There’s also a callout to Harrenhall via the Black Bat sigil of Lothston, and Harrenhall – a twisted black fortress made with blood sacrifice and then melted by dragonfire – is one of those places which seems to serve as an analog to the destroyed fire moon. Barristan is the pale shadow of course, and once again we see the pairing of a white shadow and a black one who are quite different and yet have an inverted parallel relationship.

This is a nice one, from AFFC as Cersei sits in the throne room:

The torches on the back wall threw the long, barbed shadow of the Iron Throne halfway to the doors. The far end of the hall was lost in darkness, and Cersei could not but feel that the shadows were closing around her too. My enemies are everywhere, and my friends are useless. She had only to glance at her councillors to know that; only Lord Qyburn and Aurane Waters seemed awake. The others had been roused from bed by Margaery’s messengers pounding on their doors, and stood there rumpled and confused. Outside the night was black and still. The castle and the city slept. Boros Blount and Meryn Trant seemed to be sleeping too, albeit on their feet. Even Osmund Kettleblack was yawning. Not Loras, though. Not our Knight of Flowers. He stood behind his little sister, a pale shadow with a longsword on his hip.

Cersei feels the shadows closing in around her, and actually everyone in the room around her is implied as an Other. We have her councilors, “the others” who had been “roused from sleep,” as well as the Kingsguard, some of whom are also sleepy, and Loras who is actually named as a pale shadow. Qyburn wears a white robe, while Aurane Waters is more complex… he has pale Targaryen hair and the sea dragon symbolism of the Velaryons, but we aren’t ready to broach the topic of the connection between weirwood and the Others just yet, so just put a pin in that one. But you get the point – the Kingsguard are pale shadows or white shadows, and the tie to sleeping and dreaming here may be a clue about the Others having a link to greenseers and weirwoods.

So, Kingsguard and Others are both white shadows, and they are both pale and sword-like (remember that one of the Others is described as “sword slim”). Now, let’s refresh our memory of the language used to depict the Others with the description of the first Other Will saw from his perch in the tree during the prologue of AGOT:

A shadow emerged from the dark of the wood. It stood in front of Royce. Tall, it was, and gaunt and hard as old bones, with flesh pale as milk. Its armor seemed to change color as it moved; here it was white as new-fallen snow, there black as shadow, everywhere dappled with the deep grey-green of the trees. The patterns ran like moonlight on water with every step it took.

With all that language as fresh in your mind as a field of new-fallen snow, let’s check out some quotes about the Kingsguard. This first one is from ACOK, and this is the Hound:

The white cloak of the Kingsguard was draped over his broad shoulders and fastened with a jeweled brooch, the snowy cloth looking somehow unnatural against his brown roughspun tunic and studded leather jerkin. 

An unnatural snowy cloak – that’s good. Here’s another from Clash:

“Ser Meryn Trant of the Kingsguard,” a herald called. Ser Meryn entered from the west side of the yard, clad in gleaming white plate chased with gold and mounted on a milk- white charger with a flowing grey mane. His cloak streamed behind him like a field of snow. He carried a twelve- foot lance.  

In addition to simply noticing the snow and milk symbolism, notice that the milk-white charger has a flowing mane, the the cloak streams like a field of snow. It reminds us of the moonlight on water description of the Others’ armor, and it implies Ser Meryn and his horse melting into a puddle, streaming and flowing like the melting Other Sam stabbed with a dragonglass knife… which , by the way, went like this:

And then he was stumbling forward, falling more than running, really, closing his eyes and shoving the dagger blindly out before him with both hands. He heard a crack, like the sound ice makes when it breaks beneath a man’s foot, and then a screech so shrill and sharp that he went staggering backward with his hands over his muffled ears, and fell hard on his arse. When he opened his eyes the Other’s armor was running down its legs in rivulets as pale blue blood hissed and steamed around the black dragonglass dagger in its throat. It reached down with two bone- white hands to pull out the knife, but where its fingers touched the obsidian they smoked. Sam rolled onto his side, eyes wide as the Other shrank and puddled, dissolving away. In twenty heartbeats its flesh was gone, swirling away in a fine white mist. Beneath were bones like milkglass, pale and shiny, and they were melting too. Finally only the dragonglass dagger remained, wreathed in steam as if it were alive and sweating. Grenn bent to scoop it up and flung it down again at once. “Mother, that’s cold. ”

We only get two on-page appearances of the Others, so I figured I would go ahead and pull that quote. Plus, Sam is so heroic in that scene. You will notice the dragon locked in ice motif with the dragonglass knife and the Other, and it’s especially cool that the knife seems to have absorbed the cold of the Other – it’s now frozen fire for real!

When Sansa first meets Ser Barristan the Bold on the road to Kings Landing in AGOT, the description is as follows:

One knight wore an intricate suit of white enameled scales, brilliant as a field of new-fallen snow, with silver chasings and clasps that glittered in the sun. When he removed his helm, Sansa saw that he was an old man with hair as pale as his armor, yet he seemed strong and graceful for all that. From his shoulders hung the pure white cloak of the Kingsguard.

Snowy armor and matching hair to go along with the snowy cloaks of the Kingsguard. There might even be a whiff of the ice dragon here, with the snow white “scales” worn by Barristan, who, by the way, has blue eyes.

When Sansa sees the Kingsguard at the Tourney of the Hand later in AGOT, it goes like this:

They watched the heroes of a hundred songs ride forth, each more fabulous than the last. The seven knights of the Kingsguard took the field, all but Jaime Lannister in scaled armor the color of milk, their cloaks as white as fresh-fallen snow.

Milk and snow, just like the Others and like the hypothetical ice moon. Once again, we find the ‘scales’ to maybe, just maybe, imply something about an ice dragon. And keep in mind that when I say ‘ice dragon,’ I am referring to the larger symbol of the ice dragon which would include an icy dragon meteor from the ice moon.

Here’s another quote along these lines, this one from ADWD. It’s a little bit longer, but it’s just really nice writing and it’s packed with symbolism. Thus, I give you, Ser Barristan the Bold, taking a bath:

When the last light had faded in the west, behind the sails of the prowling ships on Slaver’s Bay, Ser Barristan went back inside, summoned a pair of serving men, and told them to heat some water for a bath. Sparring with his squires in the afternoon heat had left him feeling soiled and sweaty.

The water, when it came, was only lukewarm, but Selmy lingered in the bath until it had grown cold and scrubbed his skin till it was raw. Clean as he had ever been, he rose, dried himself, and clad himself in whites. Stockings, smallclothes, silken tunic, padded jerkin, all fresh-washed and bleached. Over that he donned the armor that the queen had given him as a token of her esteem. The mail was gilded, finely wrought, the links as supple as good leather, the plate enameled, hard as ice and bright as new-fallen snow. His dagger went on one hip, his longsword on the other, hung from a white leather belt with golden buckles. Last of all he took down his long white cloak and fastened it about his shoulders.

The helm he left upon its hook. The narrow eye slit limited his vision, and he needed to be able to see for what was to come. The halls of the pyramid were dark at night, and foes could come at you from either side. Besides, though the ornate dragon’s wings that adorned the helm were splendid to look upon, they could too easily catch a sword or axe. He would leave them for his next tourney if the Seven should grant him one.

If this isn’t ice dragon symbolism, I don’t know what is. Blue-eyed Ser Barristan has ice armor that is as white as snow, dragon wings on his helm, and he puts all this on and goes out into the world after the last light fades. And after a good cold bath, of course. Once again I will simply highlight the fact that white sword, white shadow, and ice dragon symbolism is applied to both the Kingsguard and the Others.

Ice dragons meteors come from icy moons, and the Kingsguard’s white steel armor, which can look as white as snow or as hard as ice, can also look as pale as the moon, as we see in a Sansa chapter of ACOK:

Below, she could see a short knight in moon-pale armor and a heavy white cloak pacing the drawbridge. From his height, it could only be Ser Preston Greenfield.

I’ll briefly mention that Ser Preston and all of the Greenfields live in a weirwood castle called the Bower – it’s true, look it up – just as the “white walkers of the wood” probably come from the weirwoods in some sense. More on that in a future episode.

Now back in AGOT, Ned sees a Kingsguard on that same bridge and the description again fits the Others, but in a slightly different way:

Ser Boros Blount guarded the far end of the bridge, white steel armor ghostly in the moonlight.

The Others are ghosts in some sense, and of course they are known to love that pale moonlight. The one Will saw in the prologue had a sword which was “alive with moonlight” and which had “a ghost-light that played around its edges,” and the Ser Boros of the Kingsguard is himself a white sword, and his white steel is looking ghostly in the moonlight.

Think about the idea of a white sword which glows with ghost light for a second… this idea is repeated in one other place I can think of, and it’s associated with milkglass too. It’s such a weird quote I just have to let Martin read it to you. And yeah, this is the part of the podcast where things get weird.

Down in the Shadow Lands beyond Asshai, they say there are oceans of ghost grass, taller than a man on horseback with stalks as pale as milkglass. It murders all other grass and glows in the dark with the spirits of the damned. The Dothraki claim that someday ghost grass will cover the entire world, and then all life will end.

Stalks of grass are also called blades of grass, and these murderous blades of ghost grass are taller than a man and as pale as milkglass. It’s a field of Dawn swords, essentially – and they glow in the dark with the spirits of the damned, just as the Others’s swords glow with ghost light. But the Others and their analogs in the Kingsguard are both like ghostly white swords themselves, so the prophecy of the ghost grass covering the world and ending all life really just sounds like a prophecy of the return of the Others, marching to exterminate mankind, pale glowing swords in hand.

I don’t know what that ghost grass really is – I assume it’s some kind of toxic weed, in actuality – but I also have to assume that the symbolically rich description is there to tell us about Dawn. The narrative makes the ghost grass sound like Dawn, but then it adds in the ghost light motif and the notion of the ghost grass covering the world and ending all life, both of which make us think of the Others and encourage us to think about them as having a link to Dawn.

The fact that this ghost grass is found around Asshai is yet another clue about there being a link between Azor Ahai, who comes from Asshai, and the Others and possibly the Night’s King, but we aren’t quite ready to talk about that yet. Next episode though, I promise.

Returning to the subject of the Kingsguard, the last point I want to make is that besides these ties to icy symbolism and ghost symbolism and moon symbolism, the white swords of the Kingsguard also have ties to Dawn symbolism, and this is another scene from the Tourney of the Hand in AGOT:

The shields displayed outside each tent heralded its occupant: the silver eagle of Seagard, Bryce Caron’s field of nightingales, a cluster of grapes for the Redwynes, brindled boar, red ox, burning tree, white ram, triple spiral, purple unicorn, dancing maiden, blackadder, twin towers, horned owl, and last the pure white blazons of the Kingsguard, shining like the dawn. 

Hello. The blazon of the white sword brothers is shining like the dawn. Go back in time 20 years or so, and you might find one Ser Arthur Dayne standing under that pure white blazon, with his shining white sword Dawn.

This scene has to remind us of the very poetic description of the Sword of the Morning constellation which Jon gives us in ASOS which we quoted a little bit earlier – you will recall the white star in its hilt blazing like a diamond in the dawn. It’s nice to see similar language used to describe the white banners of the Kingsguard, who symbolize the Others, and the Sword of the Morning constellation.

Ser Mandon on the bridge of ships was called “a white steel shadow,” while Ser Boros’ white steel armor looked ghostly in the moonlight, and in TWOAIF Dawn is described by the maesters as being some kind of white steel, looking “like no Valyrian steel they know, being pale as milkglass but in all other respects it seems to share the properties of Valyrian blades, being incredibly strong and sharp.” Dawn is a white steel sword, and so are the Kingsguard, whose white blazons shine like the dawn.

Now you can see why it is so perfect that Arthur Dayne joined the Kingsguard. He’s walking around with what I believe to be the sword of the King of Winter, and so he found an order of knights who like to dress up as Others and signed up as quick as he could. I’ll close this section with a quote about Ser Arthur Dayne, taken from Jaime’s inner monologue as he stands inside the White Sword Tower:

And he’d held his own against the Smiling Knight, though it was Ser Arthur who slew him. What a fight that was, and what a foe. The Smiling Knight was a madman, cruelty and chivalry all jumbled up together, but he did not know the meaning of fear. And Dayne, with Dawn in hand . . . The outlaw’s longsword had so many notches by the end that Ser Arthur had stopped to let him fetch a new one. “It’s that white sword of yours I want,” the robber knight told him as they resumed, though he was bleeding from a dozen wounds by then. “Then you shall have it, ser,” the Sword of the Morning replied, and made an end of it.

Notice that Dawn is referred to here as “that white sword” – this drives home the symbolic correlation to the white sword tower in which Jaime stands as he thinks this. Jaime is, at this moment, a white sword standing inside a white sword and thinking of another white sword and his white sword.

So…  with everything we’ve seen today… I don’t think there can be any question that George is creating a high level of symbolic unity between the Kingsguard, the Others, and Dawn. I mean he’s practically beating us over the head with it. But as ever, the question is, what does it mean?

Well, we’ve started to answer that question already.  George wants to keep the Others fairly mysterious for as long as possible, as it increases their mystique and terror, so he does not give us many encounters or records of the Others to go on. Thus, the Kingsguard serve as a symbolic proxy to slip us clues about the Others. That’s the first thing. Having just shown you all the symbolism which establishes this connection, we can know periodically examine scenes with Kingsguard in them and learn about the Others… and we’ll be doing just that throughout the moons of ice and fire series.

In my opinion, the Kingsguard – Others symbolic parallel also aids the conclusion that the sword known as Dawn is almost certainly the original Ice of House Stark. In general, the Kingsguard are simply combining the icy symbolism of the Others with the symbolism of the sword Dawn: being called white swords, the blazing like the dawn symbolism, and Arthur Dayne serving as the ultimate example of a Kingsguard. I would say that one of the main purposes of making the Kingsguard symbolic stand-ins for the Others is so that we see Arthur Dayne as a symbolic Other when he unsheathes that glowing milkglass blade and understand that this was an originally a sword tied to ice magic and the Others.

But, there’s something bigger than that, having to do with the creation of the Others.

And I’ll be happy to answer that question… in Moons of Ice and Fire 3! which will be called Visenya Draconis. We’ll  examine some of the various “solar king with two lunar wives” love triangles that define ASOIAF, such as Aegon the Conqueror, Rhaenys, and Visenya; Stannis, Melisandre, and Selyse; Jon, Ygritte, and Val, and of course Rhaegar, Elia of Dorne, and Lyanna Stark.

But before we get to that, we’ll be having a Q&A livestream on the LucifermeansLightbringer youtube channel, this upcoming Saturday October 14″, at 3:30 Eastern, 12:30 Pacific, or 7:30 Greenwich Mean Time for our European friends. Send me your questions or comments by leaving a comment here on the wordpress page, or on the YouTube version of this episode, or you can catch me on Twitter, @thedragonLmL. The first one went great, and we’ll be doing this every month going forward, so don’t miss it! See you Saturday!

Pliny the Elder, Bloody Sun Mirrors, Eclipses, and Sun-Drinking

The name “heliotrope” (from Greek ήλιος helios, “Sun,” τρέπειν trepein, “to turn”) derives from the ancient belief that bloodstone had the ability to bend and alter the sun’s reflection.  The source of this information is Pliny the Elder’s Natural History:

Heliotropium is found in Æthiopia, Africa, and Cyprus: it is of a leek-green colour, streaked with blood-red veins. It has been thus named, from the circumstance that, if placed in a vessel of water and exposed to the full light of the sun, it changes to a reflected colour like that of blood; this being the case with the stone of Æthiopia more particularly.  Out of the water, too, it reflects the figure of the sun like a mirror, and it discovers eclipses of that luminary by showing the moon passing over its disk.

Based on this quote, probably the most well known concerning bloodstone / heliotrope, this section will discuss three main concepts: bloody sun mirrors, darkening or drinking the sun, and eclipses.  All of these ideas kind of work together, as they all have to do with turning the sun in some way.  The bloodstone submerged in water turns the color of the sun’s reflection to that of blood – meaning, it darkens the sun’s light.  Out of water, it reflects the sun like a mirror – now the bloodstone is turning the sun’s light by bending and refracting it.  Eclipses represent a darkening of the sun, and we see that bloodstone can not only darken the color of sunlight, but also discover eclipses.

All three of these concepts also describe qualities and actions of the bloodstone moon meteors – that’s the whole point of talking about them, of course.

First, bloodstone is a sun-mirror, a stone which reflects the light of the sun.  That makes for a great correlation with the moon itself, which only shines with reflected sunlight.  After the moon kisses the sun and explodes, its meteor children the drank the fire of the sun, which also speaks of the sun shining on to the bloodstone.

Next we have the association with eclipses.  This idea is pretty simple – in order for the moon to be perceived as “wandering too close to the sun,” and in order for the comet to look “connected” to the sun and create the image of a sun holding a comet sword, we need an eclipse alignment at the moment of impact.  Thematically, too, the moon explosion blots out the sun, eclipsing it for the duration of the Long Night.  We talked about the idea of the Bloodstone Emperor representing the darkened solar king and the Lion of Night.  Just as Azor Ahai becomes the Bloodstone Emperor by destroying the moon, the actual sun becomes a darkened sun when the moon explodes and hides its face.  This idea of a darkened sun spills out into various related ideas about shadow and drinking light, black fire or shadow fire, etc.  Anything which darkens or drinks light, anything which inverts the bright qualities of fire and light – these ought to put us in mind of the Bloodstone Emperor Azor Ahai, Lightbringer the black sword, and the bloodstone moon meteors.

The third idea, the submerged bloodstone darkening the sun’s light to the color of blood seems like a good fit with the notion of a bloodstone moon meteor which drinks the sun’s fire and lands in the ocean.  The bloodstone is said to darken the sun’s reflection to the color of blood – and since we are dealing with black blood instead of red blood when we speak of the moon’s fire transformation, we get stones covered in black blood instead of red.

To really fit the description, our black bloodstones need to be submersed in water.  This would take the form of the island-drowning sea dragon which the Grey King supposedly slew, I believe – if falling meteors can be perceived as dragons, then a meteor which falls into the sea and triggers tsunamis would make an excellent sea dragon.  The island drowning makes sense, since this legend comes to us from a people who live on islands which probably used to be connected to the main land.  A large moon meteor impact anywhere near the Iron Islands would produce horrible tsunamis which would wash over the entire area, likely killing thousands and reshaping the land.  It’s the kind of event which would be remembered in local myth, as the sea dragon Nagga certainly is.

This deadly flood tide is associated with blood on two counts.  First, it was triggered by the drowning of the moon – the impact of bloody moon meteors in the ocean.  Secondly, the ensuing flood itself can be perceived as a blood tide – specifically, a tide of moon blood.

We’re going to be tackling quite a lot of symbolism, so keep in mind that there are three actual, physical, non-metaphorical things which we are really talking about: the moon meteors, the floods they caused when they landed, and the darkness that they caused when they landed.  We’re kind of always talking about the original Azor Ahai and Lightbringer, that’s a given, but keep the meteors, floods, and darkness in mind as we go along.

I believe there is an overarching Lightbringer motif of blood and darkness, and of red and black, and that it pertains to the floods and darkness triggered by the meteors in particular.  It appears in three slightly different forms: the black and bloody tides, waves of night and blood, and streaks of red fire and rivers of black ice.  In the process of showing the next several mythical associations of heliotrope and bloodstone, we will tackle these three symbolic motifs, and we will try to learn more about the meteors, the floods, and the darkness…. because that’s what Lightbringer has to offer us.

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The Dark Tide of the Moon

We’ve seen that symbolically speaking, the moon bleeds and burns when it is stabbed by the Lightbringer comet, and the blackened “moon blood” then coats the black moon meteors.  This makes them bloodstones in the sense that they are now consecrated with the blood of the dying moon goddess.  Lyanna’s bed of blood symbolizes this perfectly – it’s the place where the moon maiden dies, bloodying the stones, but also the place where Azor Ahai reborn and Lightbringer emerge from (Jon Snow in this case).  So to for the bleeding and burning heart of Nissa Nissa – the scene of her death, and the birth of Lightbringer.  Like the meteors, Lightbringer is covered in Nissa Nissa’s blood as it is born.  But the moon blood is not done – oh no.  The symbol of the moon blood does not end with bleeding on the bloodstones, meteors, and swords – it also represents the floods triggered by the sea dragon impact, the drowning of the moon.

The idea of a bloody tide caused by a bloodstone meteor fits well with the idea of a bloodstone creating the image of blood in the water which we saw in Pliny the Elder’s quote just now.  Stick a bloodstone in the water, and you get blood in the water, that’s the idea.  But of course it’s not just blood in the water, but a dark, bloody tide.   This is like a trumped up version of the fact that the normal tides are produced by the moon’s gravity.  Moons in the sky produce normal tides, but drowning moons produce bloody tides.  The image here is of blood in the water, a bloody stone in the water, etc.  I actually think Melisandre’s vision of a dark tide in A Dance with Dragons contains clues about this:

Visions danced before her, gold and scarlet, flickering, forming and melting and dissolving into one another, shapes strange and terrifying and seductive. She saw the eyeless faces again, staring out at her from sockets weeping blood. Then the towers by the sea, crumbling as the dark tide came sweeping over them, rising from the depths.  

And later in that chapter, when she’s describing her vision to Jon Snow:

“I saw towers by the sea, submerged beneath a black and bloody tide.”  

I mentioned last time that the tops of towers and mountains can be used to symbolize the celestial realm, and so a crumbling tower can certainly symbolize a falling heavenly body, as it did at the long-fallen Tower of Joy.  The towers by the sea in Mel’s vision are submerged by the bloody tide, which also recalls the bloody stones of the Tower of Joy – both are crumbled towers covered in blood.  The Tower of Joy symbolized the moon death and the forging of Lightbringer, and I believe this vision does so as well.  To corroborate this conclusion, check out the clear Lightbringer symbols with which this vision ends:

Through curtains of fire great winged shadows wheeled against a hard blue sky. 

A thousand red eyes floated in the rising flames.

The red priestess shuddered.  Blood trickled down her thigh, black and smoking.  The fire was inside her, an agony, an ecstasy, filling her, searing her, transforming her. Shimmers of heat traced patterns on her skin, insistent as a lover’s hand.

These ideas all have terrestrial meanings – Mel is literally seeing dragons flying, a likely reference to Dany’s dragons fighting the Others,  and the thousand red eyes refer to Bloodraven’s “thousand eyes and one,” (there’s also a mention of his wooden, corpse white face to go along with it).  But these ideas also have celestial meanings as well – the thousand red eyes surrounded by flame is our thousand dragon meteor shower, and the dragons as winged shadows is a reference to the black dragon meteors which bring darkness, which in turn relates to the concept of eclipsing the sun.

The black blood and the fire inside someone are flashing red lights indicating fire transformation, which refers to both literal fire transformation as Mel undergoes here and Beric does elsewhere, as well as the more symbolic fire transformation of the moon.  The agony and ecstasy language is a specific callout to Nissa Nissa’s cry of anguish and ecstasy, and the fire which is like a lover implies the procreative side of the Lightbringer myth.  We’ve covered these ideas before, and I point them out here to firm up the conclusion that this vision is talking about the forging of Lightbringer.  Even better, Mel begins the vision by wishing for one more glimpse of Azor Ahai, and ends it by musing:

I pray for a glimpse of Azor Ahai, and R’hllor shows me only Snow.

Having established this vision as a Lightbringer metaphor, let’s go back to the beginning where we see the skulls weeping blood and the black and bloody tide rising from the depths and sweeping over the crumbling towers by the sea.  In addition to the idea that the tops of towers and mountains can be used to symbolize the celestial realm, I would suggest that the tops of people – heads and crowns – can serve the same purpose.  Decapitation or throat-slitting can therefore symbolize the fall of a moon or heavenly body.  This also fits with the idea of the sun and moon sometimes being perceived as heads with faces, both in A Song of Ice and Fire and in the real world.  The sun and moon are like very, very tall people with invisible bodies, in other words.

The eyeless skulls in Mel’s vision, therefore, would seem to symbolize dead and fallen heavenly bodies, which would be our fallen moon, and the bloodstone meteors that came from the moon.  Their sockets weep blood, suggesting that the black and bloody tide in the vision is coming from the eyes of the skulls.  This would also seem to put the skulls in the position of the moon meteors.  When they land as sea dragons, the dark tide rises from the depths.  That’s our Long Night tsunami.  It’s a flood that is symbolically perceived as blood because it came from the death of the moon, and is triggered by the bloodstone moon meteors.  If those thousand red, fiery eyes can be meteors, then the eyeless skulls also speak of a moon with its eyes torn out.  The idea of the sockets weeping blood also speaks of the blood tide coming from the moon itself, since a decapitated skull – singular – can represent the dead moon.  And later in this chapter, they find the decapitated heads of three Nightswatch brothers stuck on spears of ash wood:

Where their eyes had been, only empty sockets remained, black and bloody holes that stared down in silent accusation.

A head mounted on a spear makes for a great comet symbol, and it’s one Martin has used a few times.  The shaft of ash wood creates the image of a trail of ash behind the head of the comet, while the head represents the actual meteorite, just as the eyeless skulls do.  And just as the eyeless skulls of Mel’s vision weep the black and bloody tide, here we see the empty sockets of the severed heads are black and bloody holes.  This is what I meant about Martin’s use of symbolism being internally consistent – he often gives us different versions of the same symbol in close proximity so that we can piece everything together.  The black and bloody sockets even “stare down” at Jon and the rest, like stars falling from the heavens.  The black and bloody tide first falls from the heavens, and then it rises from the depths – this is that two part association with the blood tide that I was referring to – first, bloody meteors fall from the sky, then they trigger a bloody tide from the ocean.

Lightbringer is like the fat kid at the pool doing a massive cannonball off the diving board, except the pool is filled with blood and everyone dies.  Well, almost everyone.  That’s what you get for calling people fat, that’s really mean and you should have known better.  Totally inappropriate.  So the moon is a little round – it’s just big boned, you know?  Festively plump.

Martin often seems to hide complementary symbols and concepts in his sigils and house words, particularly of obscure houses.  For example, there’s a house Blacktyde on the Iron Islands.  We know of two Blacktydes: Baelor Blacktyde, and Blind Beron Blacktyde, one of Aeron Damphair’s drowned men.  Their sigil is an interlocking pattern of black on green, creating the image of black tides flooding green lands.  This idea manifests again with Baelor Blacktyde:

Nightflyer was seized, Lord Blacktyde delivered to the king in chains. Euron’s mutes and mongrels had cut him into seven parts, to feed the seven green land gods he worshiped.

A black tide to feed the green lands, once again, and associated with sacrifice.  Baelor being cut apart to make the black tides is very similar to the moon being cut up to make black bloodstone meteors.  Those moon meteors were night flyers all right, just like the name of Baelor’s ship.  Damphair himself prophesies about this dark tide in A Clash of Kings:

Aeron Damphair raised his arms.  “And the waters of wrath will rise high, and the Drowned God will spread his dominion across the green lands!” 

As for Blind Beron the drowned man, we’ve just been given the image of the moon’s eyes being torn out and its sockets weeping the black and bloody tides, as well as the moon being drowned to unleash the dark tide… and here we see a drowned, blinded man who is a black tide.

We’ve seen eyes weeping tears of blood in a well known scene, of course, and that was Lyanna’s statue weeping blood in one of Eddard’s dreams.  And that brings us right back to the Tower of Joy once again, yet another parallel between it and Mel’s vision of the black and bloody tide.  Both have the bloody stones and crumbling towers, as well as Jon Snow, who was almost certainly born at the Tower of Joy in Lyanna’s bed of blood and who appears to Mel in her vision when she seeks Azor Ahai.

The fact that Lyanna, the dying moon maiden, is associated with tears of blood strengthens the idea that the eyeless skulls weeping blood represent the bloody moon meteors, the corpse of the dead moon goddess.  The parallels between this vision and the Tower of Joy are a good indication that Mel’s vision also refers to the moon’s death and the forging of Lightbringer.  And indeed, the idea of the bloodstone meteors triggering a black and bloody tide which rises from the depths is exactly what we are looking for, according to my premise that George is working with Pliny’s notion about submerged bloodstones creating bloody water.

As a follow up to the idea of the skulls as meteor symbols, I’d like to point out that Melisandre repeatedly sees the skulls surrounding Jon Snow, who is of course a dark solar king figure.  He’s Azor Ahai reborn, and his servants are the deadly meteors, his dragons woken from stone, and so they surround him:

The flames crackled softly, and in their crackling she heard the whispered name Jon Snow…. But the skulls were here as well, the skulls were all around him.

…and then again later in the same chapter:

 Skulls. A thousand skulls, and the bastard boy again. Jon Snow.

Of course the meteor shower is often depicted as a thousand of something, or some version of that.  It was a thousand thousand dragons in the Qarthine myth, and occasionally it’s ten thousand of something, but a thousand is the most common.  So what we are seeing here is the dark solar dragon surrounded by his thousand skull meteor children.

The same motif is repeated in the very same vision with Bloodraven, who appears as a corpse face surrounded by a thousand fiery eyes.  I’ve mentioned that Bloodraven seems to be playing into the Bloodstone Emperor Azor Ahai archetype, and we will continue to explore the ramifications of this in the future, but for now I just want to point at the consistent groupings of symbols – Jon Snow surrounded by his thousand fiery or bloody skulls, and Bloodraven surrounded by his thousand fiery eyes.  Also, notice the watery language of Bloodraven’s eyes in Mel’s vision: it says “A thousand red eyes floated in the rising flames.”  That’s very similar to the blood tide of skulls rising from the depths that we saw in that same vision.

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Moons and Sickles, The Tauroctony, and the Remaking of the World

The dark tide can come from eyes and eyeless sockets, but it also comes from decapitation, as is implied by the bodiless skulls as symbols of the dead moon and its moon meteor children.  Bran’s vision of Ser Gregor as a stone giant with an empty helmet in A Game of Thrones is instructive: behind the visor there is only darkness and thick black blood.  This foreshadows Gregor’s literal beheading and the blackening of his blood through the Red Viper’s poison spear, but it also gives us the black and bloody tide motif again, and associated with decapitation.  As we’ll see when we break down the Mountain and Viper trial by combat, Ser Gregor the Stone Giant is a tremendous moon symbol.  That’s right – not all moon symbols are feminine, and not all solar characters masculine either.  Nymeria, who brought the sun sigil to Dorne and sat in the sun shaped throne, is a good example, and of course we talked about the Maiden Made of Light of eastern legend being a representation of the bright face of the sun.  Male or female, it makes no matter – decapitating a moon character leads to darkness and black blood, another way of saying “black and bloody tide.”

We’ve made a habit out of referring to Mithras near the beginning of each essay, and it seems we need to do so again.  Many of the Azor Ahai and Lightbringer ideas are drawn from Mithras, and the idea of a blood tide covering the earth is to be found in his story as well.  Besides rock born Mithras with his sword and torch, the other very famous depiction of Mithras – the one which he appears in in over 60% of all Mithras statues – is called the Tauroctony, the slaying of the white bull.  This is a highly astronomical scene, packed with symbolism – just the sort of thing we go for around here!  As Mithras slays the bull, the sun and moon look down in favor, and the twelve constellations of the zodiac usually frame the scene.  The bull, as well as the scorpion, dog, and snake in the scene are thought to refer to constellations.  The exact meaning of the scene and its various elements are the subject of much scholarly debate, but it’s well known that observation of the stars was a central part of Roman Mithraism – they’ve even been called an astronomy cult.

Here are the important parts of the Tauronctony, the ones which pertain to Lightbringer’s forging and Azor Ahai’s rebirth.  First, Mithras looks away from the bull as he cuts its throat, because the bull is a friend to Mithras and actually represented a part of Mithras himself – just as Ghost the white direwolf is a part of Jon (yes, this is somewhat ominous).  Mithras has to kill the bull to be reborn, and the bull’s blood represents the life giving force, bringing life to the earth – the blood is sometimes depicted as ears of wheat to indicate the bounty of the harvest.  The blood of the sacrificed bull renews the world, and allows Mithras to be reborn.  There are other myths involving the slaying of a great monster – sometimes a dragon or serpent – that brings a global flood which transforms the world.  But we know George is already drawing on the Mithras lore, and so I suspect this might have been the place where he got the notion of symbolizing the flood as a blood tide.

Unfortunately, where Mithras is a solar king, Azor Ahai is an inverted solar king, and so the blood tide unleashed when he sacrificed the moon did the opposite of renewing the world and bringing life – it brought the Long Night, darkness and death.  The Worldbook speaks of the Great Empire of the Dawn legend and says that the world which survived the Long Night was “a broken place where every tribe went it’s own way, fearful of all the others..”  There’s also a reference to this idea of remaking the world as Tyrion and Haldon Halfmaester overhear the preaching of the red priests in Selhorys, who say that Benerro has decreed Daenerys to be Azor Ahai reborn, and that she was born from smoke and salt “to make the world anew.”  I suppose that “remaking the world” can cut both ways, but I’m pretty sure Azor Ahai’s remaking will involve a fair amount of blood and fire.

Let me share a bit of indigenous North American folklore concerning a comet remaking the world.  This information is from Graham Hancock’s newest book, Magicians of the Gods, which I very highly recommend, and I’m also borrowing here from an editorial he wrote for DailyMail.com about the book.  It turns out that in the real world, scientists have recently discovered evidence that the 1,200 year mini-ice age known as the Younger Dryas which lasted from 10,800 BCE to 9,600 BCE might have been triggered by a comet impact over the North American Ice Sheet.  A Long Night indeed – the comet seems to have broken apart and made multiple impacts along the northern ice sheets, destabilizing them.  As a result, large parts of the continent were simply erased with basically unfathomably violent flooding, and the ocean received vast amounts of ice cold water, which disrupted the ocean currents.  The atmosphere was also clouded with vaporized ice and tremendous amounts of debris – stop me if you’ve heard this one before.  The clouded sky and changed ocean currents kicked off a significant climate disruption, one which drove much of North America’s megafauna to extinction.  Essentially, George’s Long Night triggered by a comet is a very compressed version of this chain of events triggered by the Younger Dryas comet (as it’s now being called).

It’s nice to have science to tell us what happened ten thousand years ago, but the native peoples have seemingly kept alive stories of this event for that whole period of time (again, stop me if this sounds familiar).  I’m going to cite two in particular but there are many, many similar stories spread across North America.

The Brulé people of the Lakota nation in modern-day South Dakota have a legend of a  ‘fiery blast [that] shook the entire world, toppling mountain ranges and setting forests and prairies ablaze . . . Even the rocks glowed red-hot, and the giant animals and evil people burned up where they stood.  The rivers overflowed their banks and surged across the landscape. Finally, the Creator stamped the Earth, and with a great quake the Earth split open, sending torrents . . . across the entire world until only a few mountain peaks stood above the flood.’

The Ojibwa people of the Canadian grasslands refer to a comet called the Long-Tailed Heavenly Climbing Star which swept low through the skies, scorching the Earth and leaving behind ‘a different world. After that, survival was hard work. The weather was colder than before.’ 

Ojibwa shaman Fred Pine says “It came down here once, thousands of years ago. Just like a sun. It had radiation and burning heat in its tail.  It was just so hot that everything, even the stones, were cooked. The giant animals were killed off. You can find their bones today in the earth. It is said that the comet came down and spread his tail for miles and miles.”

This legend gives us a good idea of the kind of damage a comet or meteor impact can have.  They can literally set the entire sky on fire at temperatures that melt stone.  They leave behind a different world when they visit the earth,  just as Azor Ahai reborn will remake the world, and just as the Long Night left behind a broken world.

These descriptions could just as easily apply to the Long Night.  However, if George had given us myths this clear, it would have been too easy; so he’s made it just a bit more obscure by doling out pieces of the disaster in separate legends.  There’s so much going on in the story that you don’t really focus on the folktales, but when you line them up as we have done and will continue to do, you can see a picture almost as clear as the quotes we just read:  “The moon cracked open and the bleedings stars came down to earth like dragons and brought blood and flame everywhere they went, drowning islands and waking thunderous giants in the earth, hammering and breaking the world and blotting out the very sun.  The cold that came after was unstoppable and killed everything that the burning stars had spared.”

Also, notice in the above quote that the comet was “just like a sun” – a second sun, you might say, or perhaps “the sun’s son.”  The second sons are a sellsword company, of course, and Quentyn is described by Quaithe as the “sun’s son,” because he’s a child of House Martell, with their sun sigil.  I have a feeling those are all references to the comet – the sun spear – being like a second sun in the sky, as the Ojibwa myth describes their comet experience.

Just as the Dothraki say that one day the other moon will kiss the sun and crack as the first one did, the Ojibwa prophesy a return: ‘The star with the long, wide tail is going to destroy the world someday when it comes low again.’  So not only has this myth shaped the past of the Ojibwa and other peoples of North America, it continues to shape their perception of the future.  As you can see, George’s use of mythical astronomy which we’ve been chasing down in all of these podcasts has plenty of precedent in the real world.  I believe that George is essentially showing us a medieval society without the advantage of modern science to explain what happened 10,000 years ago –  all we have is the folklore and scattered bits of hard evidence, just as we did until very recently.  The moon destruction scenario is remembered all over the world, but George has cleverly hidden it in the folklore and legends and then has been sure to heap plenty of scorn on “anything heard at a woman’s tit.”  But it’s all right there, as we’ve been discovering – the moon’s sacrifice lead to tides of blood and darkness.       

Let’s return to the Tauroctony and Mithras’s slaying of the white bull whose blood remakes the world.  It’s easy to correlate the slain bull with the moon because after Mithras kills the white bull, it actually becomes the moon… simple enough.  The moon and the bull are sacrificed, and a blood tide washes over the earth – the correlation between the Mithras story and the Long Night story is striking.

The association between the moon and horned animals like cows, bulls, stags, boars, and goats is actually one of the most widespread notions in all of world mythology.  When the moon is a crescent, it’s called a “horned moon,” because it resembles the horns of these sacrificial animals.  In Egypt, lunar deities like Isis are depicted with cow horns to denote their lunar associations.  The Egyptians also have a tradition of slaughtering the sacred bull, which they called Apis.  His blood and sacrifice was also associated with harvest and fertility, and with the rebirth of the dead king – again, just as with Mithras and the White Bull.  Even more interesting is the idea that Apis was conceived by a ray of sunlight, while his mother was supposedly conceived by a flash of lightning from heaven, or by moon beams.  This is all right in the wheelhouse of the Lightbringer meteors – conceived by sun and moon, fallen to earth like a thunderbolt.  It’s just the kind of myth that George would find useful, and be able to rope into his evolving mythos.

It’s also no coincidence that at Jon’s birth at the Tower of Joy, we find a white bull being slaughtered – Ser Gerold Hightower, the white bull.  That’s a pretty great shout-out to the Mithras legend.  Calling Gerold a tower is even better, as it alludes to the heavenly realms.  Better still, the light of the Hightower’s beacon is described in A Feast for Crows as “a hazy orange moon.”  It seems like George has gone out of his way to equate the white bull with the moon, and the sacrifice of each with the birth of Azor Ahai reborn.

There’s another shoutout to this idea when Arya is getting her tour of the various temples in Bravos, which is where we found another Mithras reference last time, that of three headed Trios.

Beyond it, by the canal, that’s the temple of Aquan the Red Bull. Every thirteenth day, his priests slit the throat of a pure white calf, and offer bowls of blood to beggars.”

So, in the temple of the bull, we slit the throat of a white calf, and people drink the blood as nourishment, or perhaps asa way to invoke divine favor.  That’s a very close analog to the Tauroctony.  Lest we forget, Lightbringer the sword supposedly drank Nissa Nissa’s blood, which is why we see blood drinking ideas here and there.

The curved horns of the bull evoke the crescent moon, but they also evoke the curved knives which were often used in ritual sacrifice.

The moon was a crescent, thin and sharp as the blade of a knife.

Four times in Bran’s final chapter of A Dance with Dragons, we get this description of the moon.  That chapter is basically a montage, with the moon descriptions breaking up each mini-scene.  The chapter concludes with this vision:

Then, as he watched, a bearded man forced a captive down onto his knees before the heart tree. A white-haired woman stepped toward them through a drift of dark red leaves, a bronze sickle in her hand.

“No,” said Bran, “no, don’t,” but they could not hear him, no more than his father had. The woman grabbed the captive by the hair, hooked the sickle round his throat, and slashed. And through the mist of centuries the broken boy could only watch as the man’s feet drummed against the earth … but as his life flowed out of him in a red tide, Brandon Stark could taste the blood. 

So there’s the blood tide unleashed by sacrifice, echoing the bloody tide unleashed by the sacrifice of the moon.  The sacrifice in Bran’s vision takes the form of a throat slitting, and with a sickle-shaped blade – a thin and curved blade, just like the crescent moon.  We’ve also got the blood drinking again, as with Aquan the Red Bull.

We find another slaughtered bull in A Dance with Dragons in the form of Little Walder (the big one).  He’s the one who’s mysterious murder sets off the Freys and Manderlys in Roose Bolton’s Winterfell.  “He was butchered like a hog..” says Ser Hosteen Frey.  The thing is, in an earlier chapter in the same book, during Ramsay and Jeyne’s travesty of a wedding, the mists play tricks with Theon’s eyes and he perceives everyone strangely… and Little Walder appears in the form of a red bull.  No matter what color bull, it seems the fate is the same – cold butchery.

There’s a matching story in The World of Ice and Fire about one of the children of Garth the Green –  Bors the Breaker, who founded House Bulwer.  Supposedly Bors “drank so much bulls blood he grew a pair of shiny black horns,” and this bulls’ blood supposedly gave him the strength of twenty men.   Again we see the same ideas – horns, sacrificing bulls, drinking their blood, and a kind of transformation.  The shiny black horns of course put us in mind of the black dragonbinder horn that demands blood sacrifice to operate, which is entirely in keeping with the theme here.

The tale of Bors the Breaker and House Bulwer creates a tie-in to Mel’s black and bloody tide and the decapitated heads on spears with their black and bloody holes for sockets – one of the heads belongs to Black Jack Bulwer, descendent of Bors.  That serves a direct equation between the idea of a severed bull’s head an a moon meteor, since the heads on spears represent the decapitated moon.  Black Jack’s eyeless head shows us a decapitated moon bull becoming a black and bloody moon meteor, in other words.   I don’t know about you, but these clever little links between scenes with the same symbolism amuse me to no end.  It’s basically like a little treasure hunt, to find all the links between occurrences of the various motifs.

So now, consider Jon Snow, and the Azor Ahai archetype in general as a parallel to Mithras, which we’ve mentioned many times.  Mithras is a solar figure, just as the Azor Ahai is, excepting that Azor Ahai is an inverted, dark solar figure.   Jon has a white animal familiar, Ghost, who is a part of him, just as the white bull is a part of Mithras.  The white bull is sacrificed in order to resurrect Mithras… so… (akward silence)… it may be that Jon’s resurrection will come at a heavy price.  As a silver lining, however, I’ll mention that Jon’s spirit is expected to be stored inside of Ghost for time before his body is resurrected, and when a warg’s spirit does this, it begins to merge with the wolf.  In other words, I think that it’s likely that if this scenario comes about, what we will see is the wolf body being sacrificed, and the merged Ghost-Jon spirit will be transferred back to Jon’s resurrected body.  So it’s not quite as sad, if that turns out to be the case.

Unfortunately, there’s a bit of foreshadowing of this when Arya is down in the underbelly of the Red Keep in A Game of Thrones, in the chamber of the dragon skulls.  She recalls a time when Robb led the other kids down into the Winterfell Crypts:

Old Nan had told her there were spiders down here, and rats as big as dogs. Robb smiled when she said that. “There are worse things than spiders and rats,” he whispered. “This is where the dead walk.” That was when they heard the sound, low and deep and shivery. Baby Bran had clutched at Arya’s hand. When the spirit stepped out of the open tomb, pale white and moaning for blood, Sansa ran shrieking for the stairs, and Bran wrapped himself around Robb’s leg, sobbing. Arya stood her ground and gave the spirit a punch. It was only Jon, covered with flour. “You stupid ,” she told him, “you scared the baby.”   

So that’s ghostly Jon, the walking dead, a pale white spirit who makes a shivery sound… It’s GhostJon.

Going back to the scene of the three eyeless heads on spears, one of which is Black Jack Bulwer, we see more foreshadowing:

His huge white direwolf prowled around the shafts, sniffing, then lifted his leg and pissed on the spear that held the head of Black Jack Bulwer.

Aww, no, Ghost, not the one with the decapitated bull’s head, sonuva… Say it ain’t so, Ghost!

There’s actually a lot of foreshadowing about Jon’s resurrection in general, so a dedicated study of all of those scenes is called for and might yield more clues about how it’s going to go down.  For now I refer you to Radio Westeros episode 6, “Jon Snow, Only the Cold” or the matching essay on their page, which deal with the mechanics of Jon’s potential resurrection and the foreshadowing which indicates it.  That’s one of my favorite episodes right there.  While we were talking about Mithras slaying the white bull to be reborn, I had to mention the parallel with Jon Snow and Ghost.  Sorry to be the bearer of bad news… but like I said, merged GhostJon is probably going to kick some serious ass, so there is that.

Now, where were we…  bloodstone, bloody stones in the water, bloody tides from sacrificed moons… got it.  Here’s one more little fun tidbit regarding bloody moons and sacrifice.  On the Iron Islands, we find House Wynch, whose sigil is a bloody crescent moon on a field of purple.  A winch is a thing which pulls heavy objects out of place – we’re going to need a very big winch for the moon, of course, but that’s another essay.  And that sigil – it’s a crescent moon which is literally in a bed of blood.  Said another way, a moon crescent could be seen as a blade made of moon – flaming sword moon meteors, in other words, the moon stones which were covered in blood, like the crescent moon of House Wynch.

House Winch really does not do anything important in any of the novels, nor even in Ironborn history.  Literally the only noteworthy thing that George has written about them is their sigil – and I suspect that’s because their sigil IS the important thing about them.  A bloody crescent moon is easy to understand, given what we’ve just looked at concerning sickles and crescent moons and blood sacrifice, and attached to the word winch, it speaks of pulling down the moon.  The purple background may be meant to remind us of the Amethyst Empress and Daenerys, the purple-eyed moon maidens.

The real-world phenomena of a blood moon is the result of the moon passing through the earth’s shadow, a kind of reverse-eclipse where the earth is eclipsing the moon. I’m not sure if this is part of George’s thinking, but it’s interesting and so I thought I would mention it, because it ties together bloody moons and eclipsed moons.

So, we’re almost ready to start making bad menstruation jokes – we are talking about “moon blood,” after all – but not quite yet.  That will come later when we talk about the idea of a maiden “flowering.”  To be honest, I may not need to make any bad jokes; Martin is already having a field day with this.  As it is, we can see why he chose to refer to a women’s monthly visitor as “moon blood,” as it makes for a useful metaphor to give us hints about the moon’s sacrifice during the Long Night.

In all seriousness, my purpose here is to introduce the concept the black and bloody tide as being parts of the Long Night shit-storm of magical and metaphorical disasters, and to show how it’s directly related to moon sacrifice.  We’ve seen it come from eye sockets and eyes, as well as decapitations and throat slitting.  We’ve seen it come from the sky and from the depths.  Bloody swords and bloody moons and bloody stones. Bloody blood, everywhere.  It’s like some kind of lunar abattoir.  Who else feels like they need to wash their hands?  See what we’re really doing here is learning the secrets of the bloody bed.  This is what Mirri Maz Duur had to go through – tons of of bloody symbolism.

I know I said I’d hold off on moon blood jokes, but I’m serious – the bloody bed and the bed of blood are the same thing.  Lyanna’s bed of blood is associated with her death, but it’s where Jon is born.  Mirri Maz Dur says she “learned the secrets of the bloody bed” as a way of referring to midwifery, while the Damphair thinks to himself that the world is a cold place where “women brought forth short-lived children from beds of blood and pain.”  It’s a core element of the Lightbringer monomyth, death and life.  It’s George’s own take on the idea of the sacrificial bull whose blood renews the world.  The bull dies, but he was a part of Mithras, and Mithras is reborn.  Remember that Jon’s blue rose in the chink in the Wall “fills the air with sweetness” – perhaps there is a renewal on the way, even though the first blood tide seems to have brought death and destruction.

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Rivers of Ice and Darkness

While we’re still talking about Jon Snow, I think he’s got his own version of the black and bloody tide.  We discussed it last time – the red fire and black ice Jon thing, which is made up of two parallels scenes: his dream of being armored in black ice and wielding a burning red sword, and this optical illusion which appears in the cracks in the Wall:

Jon Snow turned away. The last light of the sun had begun to fade. He watched the cracks along the Wall go from red to grey to black, from streaks of fire to rivers of black ice. Down below, Lady Melisandre would be lighting her nightfire and chanting, Lord of Light, defend us, for the night is dark and full of terrors . “Winter is coming,” Jon said at last, breaking the awkward silence, “and with it the white walkers. The Wall is where we stop them. The Wall was made to stop them … but the Wall must be manned.

I interpreted the astronomy as follows: streaks of red fire turning to black ice as the sunlight disappears and people talk of white walkers and defending the Wall is a representation of fiery meteors streaking down to land and cause massive floods during the Long Night.  As you can see, that sequence fits very much with the black and bloody tide ideas, and I think it supports the idea that the rivers of black ice and black and bloody tide motifs do in fact refer to real floods – the rivers of black ice really sound like a flood.  It might be portrayed as icy because one of the meteors impacted a glacier in the north, as with the Younger Dryas comet here on earth, or perhaps it’s a cold flood simply because it came during the Long Night, a prolonged winter.

Right after Jon has his dream of being armored in black ice and defending the Wall with a burning red sword in A Dance with Dragons, we find this quote associating rotten ice – which is similar to black ice – with drowning:

“If the wildlings uphold the terms of the bargain, all will go as you’ve commanded.”

And if not, it may turn to blood and carnage. “Remember,” Jon said, “Tormund’s people are hungry, cold, and fearful. Some of them hate us as much as some of you hate them. We are dancing on rotten ice here, them and us. One crack, and we all drown. If blood should be shed today, it had best not be one of us who strikes the first blow, or I swear by the old gods and the new that I will have the head of the man who strikes it.”

So that’s rotten ice which leads to drowning, sandwiched by two mentions of bloodshed, with a side of decapitation.  Sounds delicious!

Consider the idea of tears in regards to the appearance of red streaks of fire turning to rivers of black ice in the cracks in the Wall.  When the Wall melts, as it does in this scene, it is said to weep.  In other words, it is the tears of the Wall which are the red streaks of fire and rivers of black ice.  Compare that to the idea of the moon crying tears of blood which are manifested as the bloodstone meteors and the blood tide.  Either way, the tears become Lightbringer meteors.  Even better, Ygitte tells Jon that the Wall is made of blood, so we can also think of the Wall’s tears as tears of blood in a sense.  Jon reinforces this by saying that one crack in the rotten ice means that “it may turn to blood.”  I could actually do a whole section on tears – Alyssa’s tears, frozen tears, the tears of Lys, Lyssa’s tears Cat’s tears – but I want to focus on the red fire and black ice right now.   Those are the moon’s tears, and they fall from the heavens like streaks of red fire or bleeding stars, and trigger rivers of black ice, the dark tide rising from the depths.  And all this goes down as the last light of the sun fades… in other words, as the sun turns dark.

So, Jon Snow, a manifestation of the dark solar king archetype, has his own black and bloody tides symbolism, from the black blood the black brothers are said to have to the streaks of red fire and rivers of black ice.  There’s a match to be found in another solar king, Khal Drogo.  Drogo is Dany’s “sun and stars,” of course, and like all Dothraki, he has those black “eyes of night.”  This is from the night of their wedding, as they prepare to consummate the union, and therefore this scene represents the forging of Lightbringer, when the sun and moon had sexy time together:

Drogo did not reply. His long heavy braid was coiled in the dirt beside him. He pulled it over his right shoulder and began to remove the bells from his hair, one by one. After a moment Dany leaned forward to help. When they were done, Drogo gestured. She understood. Slowly, carefully, she began to undo his braid. It took a long time. All the while he sat there silently, watching her. When she was done, he shook his head, and his hair spread out behind him like a river of darkness, oiled and gleaming. She had never seen hair so long, so black, so thick.

The solar king unleashes a river of darkness  when he copulates with the moon.  That river of darkness begins coiled, like a black snake, and then spreads out like black oil.  The disappearance of the bells probably denotes the disappearance of the stars.  I’ve been saving this quote for a while, to be honest.  It’s a real prize because it shows that George has had the oily black stone in mind from the very beginning, and not just in the form of the mysterious seastone chair.  The oily black river of darkness comes from the sun because the oily black stones came from the sun’s impregnation of the moon, which caused the Long Night.  It’s a nice parallel to Jon’s rivers of black ice that come from streaks of red fire as the last light of sun fades.

Two paragraphs before this, Dany notes that “Drogo towered over her as he towered over everyone,” placing Drogo and his river of darkness in the celestial realm, where it should be, just as we saw with Gerold Hightower.  The imagery if this scene is paralleled in another scene depicting Lightbringer’s forging, where Dany eat’s the stallion’s heart to give strength to unborn baby Rhaego:

Her stomach roiled and heaved, yet she kept on, her face smeared with the heartsblood that sometimes seemed to explode against her lips. Khal Drogo stood over her as she ate, his face as hard as a bronze shield. His long black braid was shiny with oil.

Bronze shields have been compared to suns on several occasions – with the Karstark sigil, with Oberyn’s shield, and with the molten eyes of Rhaegal, so it makes sense to use that symbol for Drogo’s solar face.  Before Drogo towered over Dany; here he stands over her.  And again, his braid is associated with black oil.  All this while heart blood explodes and covers the moon maiden’s face.  Dany will eventually wash this blood off by dipping herself into the “black as night” waters of the Womb of the World.  Blood and black water, once again, as moons drown.

The idea of Dany as a heart-eater makes sense when we think about the fact that meteorites are referred to as “the heart of a fallen star.”  A bloody heart would be a bleeding star, such as the red comet.  So when we see the moon maiden eating a bloody heart, we can think of the moon being force fed the Lightbringer comet.  It’s a celestial cataclysm version of that seen in the movie Seven, with the spaghetti.. okay nevermind, that was disgusting.

Anyway, the notion of moon maidens as heart-eaters draws further parallels with Joffrey’s sword named Hearteater, which is replaced by Widow’s Wail.  The name Widow’s Wail seems to refer to Nissa Nissa’s cry of anguish and ecstasy, while Lightbringer was a heart-eater, consuming Nissa Nissa’s heartblood.   Eating the stallion’s heart also makes Dany feel nauseous, just as the moon was sickened by the poisonous Lightbringer come.  Her stomach even “roils” and “heaves,” just like a turbulent ocean, and since her stomach is filed with blood, we are of course talking about an ocean of blood.  A couple of paragraphs before the quote we just cited, we read:

Despite the tender mother’s stomach that had afflicted her these past two moons, Dany had dined on bowls of half-clotted blood to accustom herself to the taste, and Irri made her chew strips of dried horseflesh until her jaws were aching.

Two moons, you don’t say.  One of those moons was a mother who ate hearts and grew sick, so I’ve heard.

To wrap up the solar king Khal Drogo’s symbolism, we see that not only does he unleash an oily black river of darkness, but he also finds himself with black blood at his time of death, as I mentioned last time.  Again we see the notorious black water and black blood motifs paired together, as well as the oil mixed in to create an association with the oily or greasy black stone.  When Drogo burns in the pyre, he lets loose greasy smoke, building on the connection between solar death and greasy or oily black stone.

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Drinking the Light, Sun Stone

I believe the black and bloody tide motif has a twin sister, and that’s the sweet child known as “waves of night and blood.”  Those are the ones we saw in the steel of Oathkeeper and Widow’s Wail, the two swords made from Ned’s Ice, Lightbringer symbol extraordinaire.  The description of the steel, which seems to have two distinct layers, is as “waves of night and blood upon some steely shore.”  Like the black and bloody tides motif, this creates the image of a dark, bloody flood that came in the Long Night.  The fact that Oathkeeper and Widow’s Wail are Lightbringer symbols suggest that the waves of blood and night were triggered by a moon meteor and by the red comet.  That’s the same message we came away with from Melisandre’s vision – black and bloody tides triggered by bloody meteors.

That’s also the same idea we came away with from the streaks of red fire turning to rivers of black ice – red meteors triggering black tides during the Long Night which are associated with Lightbringer.  That’s why I introduced these three as parallel symbols, because they tell the same story, which is Lightbringer’s story.

The parallels go a bit further than that, though, when we consider the concept of black ice.  Black ice seems to, broadly speaking, refer to three general concepts – floods (when the black ice is in river form), comets (which are dirty balls of ice and rocky iron ore) and black swords (such as Ned’s Valyrian steel sword, Ice, which is nearly black, and which I’ve taken the liberty of nicknaming “Black Ice”).   I’ve interpreted this to imply that Lightbringer was a kind of prototype for Valyrian steel, a black sword made from a black meteor which burned with red fire or black and red fire.  These meteors also caused floods, which is why Jon’s red fire / black ice motif causes dark, icy rivers which drown.  Even his black ice armor implies drowning, because in A Storm of Swords,  Dany dreams of melting warriors armored ice with her dragons, which turns the Trident River into a torrent.

It’s just the same with Oathkeeper and Widow’s Wail, whose waves of night and blood imply the dark tide.  But they also have the black ice element, like Jon’s symbols, because they are made from Ned’s “Black Ice” sword.  Black ice is a sword which creates waves of night and blood, I believe that’s the message of Ned’s sword and its children.

Basically, these are same symbols as Jon’s red fire and black ice in a slightly different configuration.  Jon’s red fire once takes the form of a burning red sword, and the other time it streaks down and turns into the black ice, which directly implies that fiery sword meteors turned into black ice, meaning black steel.  It also implies that fiery sword meteors turned into black ice, as in rivers of cold black water.  If Oathkeeper and Widow’s Wail are black ice swords that look like dark floods, what we have here in the cracks in the Wall is icy water which looks like fiery red swords turning into black icy floods.  That’s what I mean by the same set of symbols – swords, black ice, dark floods – in slightly different configurations.

As we can see, George is using the “black ice” motif to draw a connection between Oathkeeper and Widow’s Wail’s waves of night and blood and Jon’s red fire and black ice.

There can be no doubt this “waves of night and blood” language is important, because it’s given to us three times.  First Tyrion sees Widow’s Wail, and says “waves of night and blood,” and then later in the same scene, he picks up Oathkeeper, which he thinks of as a close cousin to the first and muses that the two swords “shared the same fine clean lines and the same distinctive color, the ripples of blood and night.”  Later, when Jamie gives the sword to Brienne, the wording is “Blood and black the ripples shone.”  I believe this precise choice of language exists because  it is supposed to correlate with the black and bloody tide motif, which means they both refer to the flood triggered by the meteor impacts.  The match between “blood and black the ripples shone” and “black and bloody tides” is pretty freakin close.

What’s really cool about Oathkeeper and Widow’s Wail is that they combine several different bloodstone concepts in one package.  The first is the blood consecration idea – Ned’s Ice was covered in Ned’s blood.  We are even specifically shown during the siege of King’s Landing that Ser Ilyn does not clean the blood off the blade after using it, so it seems we are supposed to think of Ice as being soiled with sacrificial blood, like the bloodstone meteors and Lightbringer itself.  We also saw that Arya perceives the red comet – the bleeding star – as Ice, covered in Ned’s blood, so again, I think George is drawing our attention to Ice as a bloody sword, and this association passes along to Oathkeeper and Widow’s Wail, whose red is the color of blood.

The second and third ways that the swords are acting like bloodstone are from the Pliny the Elder quote: darkening the sun’s reflection to the color of blood while submerged, and being a sun mirror.  Add to this the general concept of turning the sun or turning in the sun, the literal meaning of heliotrope.  Recall that the Maiden-Made-of-Light – the sun – “turned her back” and “hid her face from the world.”  In the scene where solar king Jon Snow sees the red fire and black ice in the cracks of the Wall, there’s a line that says “Jon Snow turned away. The last light of the sun had begun to fade.”  It’s like Jon is himself the sun here, and when he turns away, the last light of the sun fades… pretty cool.    

Now I’ve quoted this scene where Tyrion first sees Oathkeeper a couple of times, and this won’t be the last time either.  As you listen, watch out for watery language, and for people turning the blade. In fact, this scene is basically a couple of lions turning the sword in the sunlight over and over again.  Their solar, leonine gaze is matched by the sunlight streaming in through the windows.  If you like, you can imagine Tywin and Tyrion wearing big fuzzy yellow football mascot lion heads as we read this scene.

The light streaming through the diamond- shaped panes of glass made the blade shimmer black and red as Lord Tywin turned it to inspect the edge, while the pommel and crossguard flamed gold. “With this fool’s jabber of Stannis and his magic sword, it seemed to me that we had best give Joffrey something extraordinary as well. A king should bear a kingly weapon.” 

So that’s sunlight shimmering on the blade as solar figure Tywin turns the sword.   We see a suggestion of a flaming sword (the crossguard).  There’s also a direct reference to Stannis’s magic sword, Lightbringer.

“That’s much too much sword for Joff,” Tyrion said. 

“He will grow into it. Here, feel the weight of it.” The sword was much lighter than he had expected. As he turned it in his hand he saw why. Only one metal could be beaten so thin and still have strength enough to fight with, and there was no mistaking those ripples, the mark of steel that has been folded back on itself many thousands of times. “Valyrian steel?”

“Yes,” Lord Tywin said, in a tone of deep satisfaction.

That’s one more sword turning…

Tyrion wondered where the metal for this one had come from. A few master armorers could rework old Valyrian steel, but the secrets of its making had been lost when the Doom came to old Valyria.

I’ve mentioned that the Doom may be serving as a kind of parallel to the Long Night disaster.  The Doom was when the skies rained down dragonglass and the black blood of demons – and of course that makes a lot more sense when you think about a rain of black bloodstones instead of black blood.  The rain of dragonglass complements this idea by creating the image of falling black blades which are associated with dragons.  The Doom was also accompanied by “walls of water 300 feet high” which drowned whole islands, to use a phrase we know.  Since I am suggesting the “waves of night and blood crashing upon some steely shore” in these swords is referring to the floods triggered by the moon meteors, I like the fact that the Doom – a story about floods and a rain of black blood and dragonglass – is mentioned right in the middle of this scene.

This is of course another manifestation of the “storm of swords” motif, and again there’s a parallel to be found on the Iron Islands, where they sing “old reaving songs” like   “The Bloody Cup” and “Steel Rain” – you know, all the classics.  Time after time, we see these concepts paired together – the rain of swords or steel and the waves of blood, with the idea of a bloody cup giving us the blood-drinking connotation we saw earlier with Aquan the Red Bull and Bors the Breaker, a connotation which of course originates with Lightbringer drinking Nissa Nissa’s blood.  Like I said – meteors, floods, and darkness.

“The colors are strange,” he commented as he turned the blade in the sunlight. Most Valyrian steel was a grey so dark it looked almost black, as was true here as well. But blended into the folds was a red as deep as the grey. The two colors lapped over one another without ever touching, each ripple distinct, like waves of night and blood upon some steely shore. “How did you get this patterning? I’ve never seen anything like it.” 

There’s our payoff quote, and once again it’s the same structure – swords that bring blood and night.  All of the watery imagery in this scene and in the sword itself works to create the image a submerged bloodstone.  Just a minute ago, we saw a rain of blood that symbolizes sword-like meteors, and we saw something very similar when we looked at Melisandre’s vision of the black and bloody tide, where the skulls weeping blood symbolized the sword meteors.  Now we see the reverse: a sword that looks like waves of blood, instead of blood that represents swords.  Of course it goes without saying that all of these symbols are associated with Lightbringer.  

We also see another blade turning – that’s three now – and this time it’s turned in the sunlight specifically.  And now, the other payoff quote, which will introduce our next important concept:

“Nor I, my lord,” said the armorer. “I confess, these colors were not what I intended, and I do not know that I could duplicate them. Your lord father had asked for the crimson of your House, and it was that color I set out to infuse into the metal. But Valyrian steel is stubborn. These old swords remember, it is said, and they do not change easily. I worked half a hundred spells and brightened the red time and time again, but always the color would darken, as if the blade was drinking the sun from it. And some folds would not take the red at all, as you can see.

So, it was colored a bright red, but that stubborn old sword absolutely insists on darkening the color to that of blood – just like a submerged bloodstone is supposed to do.  That’s a pretty specific reference to heliotrope, and it’s the kind of thing that should clear up any doubt about whether or not George is mining the associations of bloodstone and heliotrope as a part of his Lightbringer mythos.

Drinking the sun’s light is important, because the the moon meteors drank the sun’s fire – I’ve mentioned this before, you’re not impressed.  Well, that was before we were thinking about bloodstone as something which darkens the sun’s light.  We are about to get into plants which are said to act “heliotropically” because their flowers and leaves very noticeably turn to face the sun throughout the day, the better to drink up its light.  Another related concept is the idea of bloodstone as a sun stone – a stone which soaks up the sun and is therefore imbued with solar energy.  These are all types of light-drinking.

The list of things which drink the light in A Song of Ice and Fire seems carefully chosen, when you take a look at them, and I believe that they all refer to moon meteors, or thing burnt by moon meteors.  The moon drinks the sun’s light and fire, and as a result, the moon meteor children are themselves sun-drinkers, so either Lightbringer itself or things stabbed by Lightbringer should be expected to drink the light.

• Oathkeeper and Widows Wail – we got that.  Lightbringer symbols.

• The oily black stone of Asshai – might be moon meteor stone, or stone burnt black by moon meteor impacts.  Perhaps there’s a nasty black moon meteor at the heart of the shadowlands whose poison is leeching into the very land and turning the stone black and greasy.  Any of these ideas would fit the pattern.

• The stone of the pit Viserion and Rhaegal are chained up in in A Dance with Dragons: “Walls and floor and ceiling drank the light. Scorched, he realized. Bricks burned black, crumbling into ash.”  Stone burnt by dragon fire fits in with the bloodstone meteors which drank the sun’s fire.

• The House of the Undying, from A Clash of Kings:  “Long and low, without towers or windows, it coiled like a stone serpent through a grove of black-barked trees whose inky blue leaves made the stuff of the sorcerous drink the Qartheen called shade of the evening. No other buildings stood near. Black tiles covered the palace roof, many fallen or broken; the mortar between the stones was dry and crumbling. She understood now why Xaro Xhoan Daxos called it the Palace of Dust. Even Drogon seemed disquieted by the sight of it. The black dragon hissed, smoke seeping out between his sharp teeth. “Blood of my blood,” Jhogo said in Dothraki, “this is an evil place, a haunt of ghosts and maegi. See how it drinks the morning sun? Let us go before it drinks us as well.”     A stone serpent is a great comet symbol, and this stone serpent is heavily associated with shadows.  To find it drinking the sun – the morning sun, no less – is not a surprise.  As a bonus, I’ll mention that the Nightswatch brother called Stone Snake comes from the shadow tower – and the House of the Undying literally is a shadow tower, a tower which doesn’t actually exist.  Dany seems to climb up and up, only to run straight out after Drogon lights the place up.  It’s a shadow tower that’s a stone snake, a pretty cool parallel.

•  Renly’s armor right before he’s assassinated: this scene is too heavy to even get into in any depth, but the long and short of it is that Renly’s armor drinks the light, right before he has his throat slashed by Azor Ahai’s “shadowsword,” the shadow of a sword which is not there – Stannis’s fake Lightbringer.  As a victim of Lightbringer, he is the right man to drink the light – sorry Renly, you don’t get a choice.  After Renly’s throat is cut, the blood washes over his armor like a “dark tide” and “an evil flow,” and “drowns out the green and gold,” which are the colors of summer and life, of plants and sunshine.  Renly’s last word is “cold…”  As this dark deed goes down, all the lamps in the tent go out.   The tent was a “magical castle, alive with light” right before, so the transformation is notable.  Light-drinking, Lightbringer the shadowsword, throat cutting, the dark blood tide, and then darkness and cold.

(Interestingly, there’s a link between the light drinking stone of the dragon’s pit under the pyramid and Renly’s armor. Renly’s light-drinking armor is described as “a deep green, the green of leaves in a summer wood,” while Rhaegal, the green and gold dragon, has “scales of dark green, the green of moss in the deep woods at dusk, just before the last light fades.”  We’ll revisit this idea when we turn the focus to Garth the Green and horned god archetype, a subject I am eager to get to.) 

As we can see, the “drinking the light” or “drinking the sun” phrases are consistently used in a way which refers to the Lightbringer meteors, and I believe this is in accordance with bloodstone as being a stone which darkens the sun, which drinks its light.  Since it is one of the first basic facts we are given about the meteors – they drank the fire of the sun – I think it’s quite important.  Essentially, I see this as a corroboration of the general premise of the last episode, that the Bloodstone Emperor Azor Ahai represents the inverted solar king who brought the Long Night, and that Lightbringer is associated with shadow and darkness, with drinking the light instead of giving it off.  Contrast the “alive with light” language applied to the sword Dawn with the idea of “drinking the sun’s light” associated with Oathkeeper and Widow’s Wail – should we really expect Azor Ahai’s sword to give off light?  Not any kind of natural light, that’s for sure.  It should be light or fire that has been turned, somehow…

I can’t help but think that the concept of black fire goes back to Lightbringer as well.  All the symbolism between the black dragons and Lightbringer match, so I don’t see why Azor Ahai’s sword wouldn’t light up with black and red flame.  I’ve got my fingers crossed that Brienne’s sun drinking, red and black sword might have a chance at doing the black fire thing.  Maybe Blackfyre itself, if it ever surfaces.  Fingers crossed.

To finish up on Oathkeeper and Widow’s Wail, here are the ways in which these swords act like bloodstone.  They are consecrated in blood like bloodstone; they turn in the sunlight like bloodstone, they drink the sunlight like bloodstone, they darken the sun’s reflection to the color of the blood like bloodstone, and they imply a submersion in water as they darken the sun’s reflection to blood, like bloodstone.  I believe this is good evidence in support of the ideas laid out so far concerning bloodstone and Lightbringer, and that the waves of blood and night swords which drink the light are a part of the Lightbringer family of symbolism.

This also raises the possibility that Ned’s sun-drinking black sword is literally made from moon meteor stone.  Perhaps it’s the original Lightbringer of Azor Ahai, kept in the crypts of Winterfell for millennia until it could be passed off as Valyrian steel.  Or perhaps the Valyrians sold Ned’s ancestor Lightbringer by accident!  Whoops!  (I’m picturing some silver haired Valyrian intern getting fed to a dragon by his superiors for selling Ned’s great-grandaddy Lightbringer by mistake.)  Or perhaps all Valyrian steel has black meteor stone in it – that’s probably more likely to be the case.    It’s hard to know because we haven’t seen anyone try to color another Valyrian steel sword, so we don’t know if the weird way Ned’s sword acts is unique or not.  I’m going to do an episode focusing on Valyrian steel sword exclusively, and we’ll take a detailed look at what exactly happens when Ice is split and reforged.

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The Black Dread Reborn

Compare the three bloody flood motifs we’ve examined so far – the black and bloody tides, the waves of night and blood, and the red fire and rivers of black ice – to one of our other prime Lightbringer symbols, Drogon, and notice the tight correlations in the wording.  The black dragon in Dany’s dream which represents Drogon has scales as “black as night, wet and slick with blood,”  matching the “waves of night and blood” language exactly.  Drogon’s egg meanwhile is called “black as a midnight sea,” like waves of night, in other words – “yet alive with scarlet ripples and swirls” – there’s our waves of blood, and the whole thing speaks of a black and bloody tide from the sea.  When Drogon’s egg finally hatches, there are many uses of watery language to describe the fire, which I highlighted when we dissected that scene in the first podcast.  Drogon’s blood, of course, is black and burning.

“Aegon’s dragons were named for the gods of Old Valyria,” she told her bloodriders one morning after a long night’s journey. “Visenya’s dragon was Vhagar, Rhaenys had Meraxes, and Aegon rode Balerion, the Black Dread. It was said that Vhagar’s breath was so hot that it could melt a knight’s armor and cook the man inside, that Meraxes swallowed horses whole, and Balerion … his fire was as black as his scales, his wings so vast that whole towns were swallowed up in their shadow when he passed overhead.”

The Dothraki looked at her hatchlings uneasily. The largest of her three was shiny black, his scales slashed with streaks of vivid scarlet to match his wings and horns. “Khaleesi,” Aggo murmured, “there sits Balerion, come again.”

“It may be as you say, blood of my blood,” Dany replied gravely, “but he shall have a new name for this new life.”

He is Balerion the Black Dread come again, and like Balerion, Drogon the Winged Shadow has that black fire shot through with red.  Although this fire can still be bright when in a very dark place, such as the House of the Undying where Drogon’s fire is described as “bright and hot,” the general notion of fire which is black speaks of inverting the luminescent qualities of fire – in other words, drinking the light, darkening the sun’s fire, etc.  The House of the Undying example is the only time his fire is called bright – every other time it’s “dark flame” or “black fire.”  As an aside, the idea that even the black fire of the black dragon can be bright in comparison to unnatural blue shadows like the Undying might suggest that Lightbringer the evil black sword might still be effective in fighting the Others – this could be the potential redemption arc for Lightbringer which I have mentioned a few times.  Perhaps the idea is that we have to drink all that blue starlight clean out of their bodies so they melt into a little puddle.

Drogon also matches other aspects of bloodstone, such as the idea of bloodstone being a sun-stone which is imbued with the power of the sun (due to all that sun-drinking it does, of course).  The Qarthine myth tells us that the dragon meteors drank the fire of the sun, and that that is why they  breathe flame – they’ve been imbued with solar power (dark solar power, but still).  Last time we examined a couple of quotes that show that Lightbringer is imbued with the power of the sun – it’s called “the sun made steel” when Stannis unsheathes it at the Wall, and Grenn tells Jon that “it glows like it had a piece of sun inside it.”  Drogon, who is himself “fire made flesh,” has some similar quotes:

She put her palm against the black egg, fingers spread gently across the curve of the shell. The stone was warm. Almost hot. “The sun,” Dany whispered. “The sun warmed them as they rode.”

There’s also this line about living Drogon from A Dance with Dragons:

Drogon was curled up beneath her arm, as hot as a stone that has soaked all day in the blazing sun. 

Look, he’s even curled into a cute little Drogon-ball.  The language here is pretty specific – Drogon soaks up the sun, like a stone.  He’s just like the bloodstone, a stone which drinks the sun and is therefore imbued with solar energy.

Let’s even slip in a little eclipse talk here too, because Drogon, the winged shadow, seems to have a habit of covering things in shadow.  We already saw that Balerion’s wings could swallow a whole town in shadow when he passed overhead – when he eclipses the sun, in other words, and Drogon exhibits the same behavior.  This is from the end of A Dance with Dragons, as Dany is stranded with Drogon in the Dothraki Sea:

The second time he passed before the sun, his black wings spread, and the world darkened.

Earlier in A Dance with Dragons, when Drogon lands in the fighting pits with Daenerys, like her knight in shining armor, we get this quote:

Drogon rose, his wings covering her in shadow.  Dany swung the lash at his scaled belly, back and forth until her arm began to ache.  His long serpentine neck bent like an archer’s bow.  With a hisssssss, he spat black fire down at her.  Dany darted underneath the flames, swinging the whip and shouting, “No, no, no. Get DOWN!”  His answering roar was full of fear and fury, full of pain.  His wings beat once, twice… and folded.  The dragon gave one last hiss and stretched out flat upon his belly.  Black blood was flowing from the wound where the spear had pierced him, smoking where it dripped onto the scorched sands.  He is fire made flesh, she thought, and so am I.  (ADWD, Daenerys)

Drogon is just kind of showing off the range of Lightbringer symbolism here: a serpent, an archer’s bow, a spear, a whip, wings of shadow, burning black blood, black fire, smoke… Drogon also “rose,” like a rising sun or moon or star.  The folded wings may reference the idea of folded steel – Valyrian steel – which is steel made in dragon fire, of course.

The mention of the whip, also called a lash in this scene, brings up a little detail I’d like to clean up from the first podcast.  During the Alchemical Wedding scene, I pointed to Drogo’s flaming lash which seems to crack open the first dragon’s egg as the specific symbol of Lightbringer the comet:

Now, she thought, now, and for an instant she glimpsed Khal Drogo before her, mounted on his smoky stallion, a flaming lash in his hand. He smiled, and the whip snaked down at the pyre, hissing.

I neglected to point out that at the beginning of the scene, Dany looks right at the comet and calls it the “Dragon’s Tail.”  The tails of the dragons are in turn often described as a whip and a lash – it happened twice in the fighting pit scene, a bit before the section I quoted.  The idea that a “dragon’s tail” can refer to the red comet or a lash reinforces the idea that Drogo’s hissing, flaming lash was in fact meant to represent the comet as it “snaked down” and cracked the stone egg, just like Lightbringer is supposed to.  Just for good measure, George also gives us several occurrences of a whip cracking like thunder, evoking the lightning / thunderbolt motif and bloodstone’s association with causing lightning and thunderstorms, while the dragon’s eggs cracked by Drogo’s fiery, hissing lash make a sound “as loud and sharp as thunder.”  Drogon himself also brings thunder, as we see in this earlier quote from the Daznak’s pit scene:

Above them all the dragon turned, dark against the sun. His scales were black, his eyes and horns and spinal plates blood red. Ever the largest of her three, in the wild Drogon had grown larger still. His wings stretched twenty feet from tip to tip, black as jet. He flapped them once as he swept back above the sands, and the sound was like a clap of thunder.

The flying dragon “turns, dark against the sun,” evoking the sun-turning definition of heliotrope and the ideas of darkening the sun and eclipsing the sun.  Dark against the sun implies an eclipse, with Drogon playing the role of dragon moon superimposed over the sun.  Drogon’s red is called blood red, to go along with the various times his scales have been called “black as night.”  Night and blood, once again.  Elsewhere in A Dance with Dragons, Drogon’s eyes are called “pits of fire” and “smoldering red pits,” which remind us of the black and bloody holes in the decapitated heads of the Nightswatch brothers.  Even better, Dany actually sees herself in the reflection of Drogon’s red eyes in the pit scene – since reborn Daenerys is now a solar king, Azor Ahai reborn, Drogon’s eyes are acting like sun-mirrors – but of course the reflected image is turned to the color of blood, like a true bloodstone.

There’s just one more bloodstone idea to be found with Drogon.  Bloodstone is sometimes called the “mother goddess stone,” and it’s associated with moon goddesses who resurrect the dead solar king, like Isis, Inanna, and Ishtar / Astarte.  Drogon is a symbol of Azor Ahai reborn and Lightbringer, which parallels the idea that Drogon is named after Drogon and hatches when Drogon is burned, or even that Drogon contains some element of Drogo’s spirit or life-force.  Dany hatched Drogon – so in other words, she resurrected the solar king.  There are actually a lot of Ishtar / Daenerys parallels – Ishtar’s statues usually have amethyst for eyes, for a start – but I will save that for a future essay focusing on moon goddesses and night goddesses.  The red comet, which also represents reborn Drogo, is of course a bleeding stone, so again we see the resurrection of the solar king concept intertwined with bloodstone.

I’ve mentioned that the concept of Azor Ahai reborn can appear as resurrected Azor Ahai, or as the child of Azor Ahai.  You might even be tired of me saying it.  But consider this – Drogon represents both the resurrected solar king AND Dany’s child.  And that’s exactly what I am talking about with consistency of symbols.  Martin devises ways to create symbols which represent two concepts at once, or even more than two.  And then there’s this bit from A Dance with Dragons, as Daenerys ponders the meaning of Mirri Maz Durr’s “prophecy:”

The meaning was plain enough; Khal Drogo was as like to return from the dead as she was to bear a living child.

Khal Drogo returning from the dead and Dany bearing a living child would both represent Azor Ahai reborn, just as Drogon represents both reborn Drogo and Dany’s living child.

All in all, we can see that Drogon is a Lightbringer symbol par excellence, and just like Oathkeeper and Widow’s Wail, he’s showing off many of the attributes of bloodstone.

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Dark Wings, Dark Stars

The ultimate sun drinking quote comes from a Bran chapter of A Dance with Dragons.  What, I ask you, is the absolute epitome of drinking sunlight?  In the whole entire universe, what’s the most well known mascot of drinking the light?  Why, a black hole of course.  A dark-star.  Since the chief sun-drinker in our story is the moon, it sure would be nice if Martin found some way to describe the moon as a black hole.

The moon was a black hole in the sky.  Wolves howled in the wood, sniffing through the snowdrifts after dead things.  A murder of ravens erupted from the hillside, screaming their sharp cries, black wings beating above a white world.  A red sun rose and set and rose again, painting the snows in shades of rose and pink.  Under the hill, Jojen brooded, Meera fretted, and Hodor wandered through dark tunnels with a sword in his right hand and a torch in his left.  Or was it Bran wandering?  No one must ever know. 

The great cavern that opened on the abyss was as black as pitch, black as tar, blacker than the feathers of a crow.  Light entered as a trespasser, unwanted and unwelcome, and soon was gone again; cookfires, candles, and rushes burned for a little while, then guttered out again, their brief lives at an end. 

Wooo-boy!  Now we’re getting somewhere.  The moon is a black hole, a dark star, a light-vortex.  It’s like a b-side to Soundgarden’s “black hole sun” – black hole moon.

First, wave hello to Mithras!  The sword in one hand and torch in the other of Bran-controlled Hodor is a clear allusion to rock-born Mithras.  Mithras-HodorBran “wanders” – the word is used twice – as the sun rose and set and rose again, giving us the idea of a dying and resurrected sun, or perhaps a dying and resurrected solar deity.  Which is exactly what Mithras is, of course, and it’s what Azor Ahai seems to be.

Ok, so let’s talk about ravens.  Ravens are obviously a very important symbol in the novels, woven through many scenes and chapters in every book. Similarly, they are a very important symbol in regards to mythical astronomy.  It may not surprise you that I am going to propose that ravens (and crows) represent black moon meteors.  There are several reasons of this, so here it goes.

Crows and ravens are flying black things, like the meteors.  Note the synergy of blackness in this quote between the abyss, the ravens, the crows, and the black hole moon.  The moon is a black hole, while the abyss gets an entire paragraph dedicated to describing how uber-black it is (that’s so metal, bro).  The ravens erupt like meteors, and just when the moon is a black hole – that’s exactly when we should see meteors.  The ravens have beating black wings – beating like a heart pumping black blood, I would say.  It reminds us of Orell’s eagle with it’s heart burnt to a blackened cinder by fire magic, as well as the other black hearts we’ve discussed.  Just the other day I noticed that Robert refers to having driven the spike of his war hammer right into Rhaegar’s “black heart,” which is perfect, since Rhaegar is a terrific incarnation of the Azor Ahai / dark solar king archetype, the black dragon.   Then we have the black feathers of a crow, to which the light-drinking abyss is compared. This certainly puts us in mind of the NightsWatch, who are called crows, and are said to have “black blood.”  Crows and ravens basically share the same symbolism – they’re like cousins, as we are told by Maester Aemon.  Darkness, black blood, erupting or “pouring forth,” drinking light and killing the light – stop me if this sounds familiar to you.

These two paragraphs seem like a terrific example of George presenting us with a cohesive set of symbols which all pertain to the same thing, a technique we have seen many times by now.  The raven – meteor parallels actually go a bit further, too.  The maester’s chain link for learning ravencraft is… (wait for it) …black iron.  Black iron meteorites are exactly what we are talking about.  Those are the ones you can make swords from.

The ravens come from places which symbolize the celestial realm.  In the above quote, it was the hillside, which is something like a small mountain.  Just as with mountains and towers and people, the tops of trees can be used to symbolize the celestial realm, as it is in the real world with the Yggdrasil tree of Norse myth and many other mythological “world trees.”  Items placed in the upper branches of such a tree therefore represent heavenly bodies.  Of course the limbs of the weirwood trees are usually where we find the ravens.

We also find the red leaves of the tree, which are described as bits of flame or bloody hands, both of which are familiar to us as moon meteors symbols.  There’s a black abyss of symbolism around red and bloody hands we can fall into – another time perhaps – such as with Benerro and his fiery-fingered moon-destruction pantomime, or with Timmet, the “Red Hand” of the “Burned Men” in the “Mountains of the Moon.”  We’ve also got Jon Snow, who burns his hand fighting the wights, and then shortly after, gets both arms bloody to the elbow while flinging dead meat to the  ravens.  We’ll stop there for now, but the point is made: bloody hands of flaming hands represent the fiery hand of god which flings the bloody meteors, so to speak, and I believe that’s why Martin chose them as symbols for the weirwood leaves, because the branches of the tree represent the celestial realms.   That also includes things besides the ravens and the red leaves, such as fruit, when Martin wants to show a star being “plucked” from the sky.  This also ties in to the Garden of Eden story and the fruit of the tree which represents the knowledge of the gods that Adam ate.  Stealing the knowledge of the gods, plucking the apple from the tree, plucking the moon from heaven – this is the well-known mythological theme which George is making excellent use of.

Ravens are used as messengers – “dark wings, dark words,” as they say.  They are viewed as omens – dark ones – and the red comet is called the “red messenger” and is said to foretell blood and fire.  You might even say these meteors were messengers of starry wisdom, since the Bloodstone emperor worshipped his black stone and became the high priest of said starry wisdom church.

The red comet is also called the “sword that slays the seasons” just as the white ravens are sent out to herald the change of seasons.  I think the white ravens being the ones to herald the season change is interesting, because Lightbringer was white hot right before it stabbed Nissa Nissa, and we’ve talked about that correlating to the original Lightbringer comet being white and pale blue like a normal comet before it struck the moon, with the surviving half only turning red after passing through the fire.  The white raven / comet heralded the change of season – from fall to winter, but then we only got the black ravens / meteors during the night.  This would also square with the idea of Dawn representing some kind of technology from the lost Great Empire of the Dawn, whose gemstone emperors appear to Daenerys in her wake the dragon dream holding swords of pale fire.  It seems like Azor Ahai’s black sword might be a corrupt version of the original design, which shone with pale flame.

Not only do crows and ravens erupt from the heavens and drink the light – they’re good for eclipses, too.  Since we have the raven imagery fresh in our minds, let’s take a look at this quote, the scene in which Coldhands makes his dramatic entrance, stage left:

“Fair.” The raven landed on his shoulder. “Fair, far, fear.” It flapped its wings, and screamed along with Gilly. The wights were almost on her. He heard the dark red leaves of the weirwood rustling, whispering to one another in a tongue he did not know. The starlight itself seemed to stir, and all around them the trees groaned and creaked. Sam Tarly turned the color of curdled milk, and his eyes went wide as plates. Ravens! They were in the weirwood, hundreds of them, thousands, perched on the bone-white branches, peering between the leaves. He saw their beaks open as they screamed, saw them spread their black wings. Shrieking, flapping, they descended on the wights in angry clouds. They swarmed round Chett’s face and pecked at his blue eyes, they covered the Sisterman like flies, they plucked gobbets from inside Hake’s shattered head. There were so many that when Sam looked up, he could not see the moon. “Go,” said the bird on his shoulder. “Go, go, go.”

A fabulous clue that the limbs of the weirwood represent the celestial realm comes here as the the starlight stirs while the leaves whisper.  Whispering leaves is in fact the communication medium of the weirwoods, as we have seen with  several Bran scenes throughout the series.  Starlight, too, whispers, to Daenerys on three different occasions.  I believe this relates to the concept of starry wisdom – the wisdom of the heavens.  In one scene, Quaithe is literally manifesting herself as a mask of starlight in the sky while whispering advice to Dany.  Being a shadow binder from Asshai who dispenses wisdom through starlight, Quaithe is a prime candidate to be an actual devotee of the Church of Starry Wisdom – I certainly tend to think of her in this way.  In any case, we see the leaves whispering and the starlight stirring in the same sentence, and right at the crucial moment.  From the celestial realm of the weirwood, angry clouds of ravens with sharp beaks and cries pour forth – so many that they blot out the moon.  During the Long Night, everyone gets eclipsed.  All heavenly lights are blotted out.  You might say that “when the moon disappears from sight, we get angry clouds of black death messengers.”

There’s a cool line in A Clash of Kings from Salladhor Saan that’s quite similar:

When you speak to King Stannis, mention if you would that he will owe me another thirty thousand dragons come the black of the moon. He ought to have given those gods to me. They were too beautiful to burn, and might have brought a noble price in Pentos or Myr.

Just as we get clouds of black, sun-drinking ravens when the moon is a black hole or when the moon is blotted out, we also get thousand of dragons come the black of the moon.  George has written this paragraph so that Salla wants the dragons and the burning gods, and that’s because the dragons we are really talking about – the flaming moon meters – are to be thought of as pieces of a burning god, or goddess.  When the moon turns black, the dragons are coming.

Elsewhere in the same book, it says that King Stannis’s fiery heart banner arrived at King’s Landing “during the black of the moon.”  Aegon the Conqueror was the original king that landed here, he with his night black armor, black dragon, and Blackfyre sword.  Stannis is the king who’s landing now, and he’s an Azor Ahai symbol with a fiery heart and a flaming sword called Lightbringer.  The fiery heart calls out to Nissa Nissa’s burned heart, as well as the idea of a meteor being the heart of a fallen star – a burning one, to be sure.  In other words, the king that lands by the black water is a fiery heart and a black dragon – Azor Ahai reborn in the form of a black meteor, burning red.  This meteor lands when the moon turns black.  Note also the parallel this draws between Stannis’s Lightbringer and Aegon’s sword Blackfyre… potentially another clue that Azor Ahai’s Lightbringer lit up with black fire.

One more for good measure, this time mixing the red comet with the ravens and stars.  This is from A Clash of Kings:

Jon clapped him on the shoulder with his burned hand.  They walked back through the camp together. Cookfires were being lit all around them. Overhead, the stars were coming out. The long red tail of Mormont’s Torch burned as bright as the moon. Jon heard the ravens before he saw them.  Some were calling his name. The birds were not shy when it came to making noise.

The idea here is that the ravens and the stars that are “coming out” – as in coming out of the sky – both represent the moon meteors.  So looking at the sequence of symbols in this passage, we see that the stars “come out” as the red wanderer burns as bright as the moon – in other words, after the comet and moon both burn brightly.  Immediately after, the black ravens come.  It goes one level further, actually, because Sam is said to have a “moon-face” on four separate occasions, while Jon represents Azor Ahai.  So when he claps Sam on the shoulder with his burned hand, we can imagine the burning hand of the sun clapping the moon – thunderclapping, more like.  And right after, the stars and cook fires come out, the comet and moon burn, and the ravens come in the darkness.

We’ve one last note on ravens and crows as meteors.  Remember Jon’s dream of black ice armor and a burning red sword?  Of course you do, we’ve talked about it enough.  Well in that dream, the scarecrow brothers – the ones who represent fallen NW brothers – are said to “tumble down, black cloaks ablaze.”  Now you can see that those burning crows are representations of flaming meteors, black flying things burning red.  They come from the top of the Wall – the celestial realm – as Jon performs the deeds of Azor Ahai and the Bloodstone Emperor, just as the black meteors would come from the sky as the comet stabs the moon.

As to the ramifications of the Night’s Watch being one of the many black meteor symbols… let’s consider.  The meteors function as reborn Azor Ahai’s dragons or his Lightbringer.  The Night’s Watch is a sword in the darkness, and they fight the Others with flame, so that lines up.  Does this suggest that the original Night’s Watch were Azor Ahai’s troops, his warriors?  This could work with the idea that the Last Hero was the son of Azor Ahai, what you might call Azor Ahai reborn.  Jon was Lord Commander when he had his Azor Ahai dream, commanding his scarecrow Night’s Watch brothers to “feed them flame.”  He also seems to be playing the role of Last Hero in that dream, abandoned and alone as he fights the undead enemies scuttling up the ice.

Another possible meaning of the black brothers / black meteors equivalency I can think of would be the idea that perhaps the original Night’s Watch all wielded dragonsteel, or perhaps just dragonglass.  We know the latter is true, and dragonglass, as black frozen fire that can make blades, works as a fine meteor symbol in its own right, as I believe it did with the Doom and the idea of a rain of black blood and dragonglass.

So, we’ve seen ravens erupt as the moon was a black hole.  We’ve seen ravens descend in angry clouds that blot out the moon, a type of eclipse.  We’ve seen thousands of dragons promised by an Azor Ahai type come the black of the moon.  We’ve seen Drogon eclipse the sun on two occasions. To round out this group, I give you the Darkstar eclipse:

He kept his face clean-shaven, but his thick hair fell to his collar like a silver glacier, divided by a streak of midnight black.  He has a cruel mouth, though, and a crueler tongue. His eyes seemed black as he sat outlined against the dying sun, sharpening his steel, but she had looked at them from a closer vantage and she knew that they were purple. Dark purple. Dark and angry.

He must have felt her gaze upon him, for he looked up from his sword, met her eyes, and smiled. Arianne felt heat rushing to her face. I should never have brought him. If he gives me such a look when Arys is here, we will have blood on the sand.

Darkstar is outlined against the dying sun here, which means he’s standing in front of it – in other words, the dark star is in eclipse position… and sharpening steel swords, preparing to unleash the storm.  The moon is a black hole and a dark star, and when the sun died and the swords came out, the moon appeared black as it stood outlined against the dying sun.  It’s the same language as we saw with Drogon turning “dark against the sun” as he passed in front of it.  I think it’s cool how we see these symbols of the Azor Ahai reborn / dark solar king archetype like Drogon and Darkstar eclipsing the sun. I would think it’s cool, because it supports my theory about bloodstone and the moon and eclipses, but perhaps you think it’s cool as well.

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We See Dead People

Recall back to the black hole moon quote, where we saw Mithras Hodor-Bran wandering with the sword and the torch, and right next to a sentence about the red sun rising and setting and rising again.  I mentioned that Mithras is resurrected solar king, just as Azor Ahai reborn is.  Dany is reborn in fire to become the Last Dragon.  And in the Darkstar eclipse scene above, the sun that he eclipses is a “dying sun.”  Beric is a literally resurrected Azor Ahai / Bloodstone Emperor figure, and of course Jon Snow seems headed for some kind of resurrection.  Bloodraven too is half a corpse. Heck, there’s even persistent talk of Rhaegar being resurrected, such as when the rumormonger in Vaes Dothrak says that Rhaegar has “returned from the dead and was marshaling a vast host of ancient heroes on Dragonstone to reclaim his father’s throne,” or when Cersei first beholds Aurane Waters and “almost thought Rhaegar Targaryen had returned from the ashes.”  Jaime even sees Rhaegar’s shade in his weirwood stump / flaming sword dream.

The whole point of following all this symbolism is to gain insight about the story and the characters, of course, and when an idea manifests as consistently as this, we have to ponder the meaning.  I can’t help but wonder if the message here is that Azor Ahai became an undead person at some point.  The Bloodstone Emperor was said to practice necromancy, and the city of Nefer – home of Azor Ahai look-alike “Neferion,” is known for their necromancy.  Meanwhile, Benerro, the high priest of the red temple in Volantis, says that Daenerys is Azor Ahai returned, and that “death itself will bend its knee, and all those who die fighting in her cause shall be reborn …”  …but I bet the people in the crowd weren’t thinking reborn as in zombies.  Hilariously, right after this line, Tyrion ask Haldon Halfmaester “do I have to be reborn in the same body?”  Yes Tyrion, I’m afraid that’s part of the deal.  The point is, the theme of necromancy and resurrection – zombies, in other words – is pretty thick.  Undead or half-dead Azor Ahai is a distinct possibility we have to consider.  I’d even say it’s more likely that not, given what we have seen with zombies so far in the story.

Taking this one step further, I’m actually seeing clues about undead black brothers who defend the Wall during the original Long Night as well.  Last time, I talked about how the scarecrow brothers on top of the Wall, the ones stuffed with straw, were named after fallen or absent Night’s Watch brothers.  Those are the ones who tumble down from the Wall, black cloaks ablaze, in Jon’s Azor Ahai dream.  Now consider the other black cloaked scarecrow in the story, Beric, who is called a scarecrow and has actual black blood.  Beric was resurrected by fire – he’s a fiery undead, a burning scarecrow.  Therefore, I think it’s possible that the burning scarecrow brothers in Jon’s dream represent undead black brothers, fighting with undead Azor Ahai at the Wall during the original Long Night.  We’ve already seen one undead black brother – Coldhands – and we are about have another in the form of Jon Snow.

Let’s consider Jon’s dream atop the Wall from the standpoint of Jon as the Last Hero.  We are told that the Last Hero has 12 companions, who died, and that the Last Hero ended up by himself against the Others before receiving some kind of unspecified aid from the children of the forest.  Similarly, Jon finds himself abounded and alone atop the Wall – but is he?  No, actually, he has the burning scarecrow brothers.  If those represent undead Nightswatch, then perhaps the twelve dead companions of the Last Hero were more like twelve undead companions.  We are also told that Azor Ahai did not win his battles alone, and there is a song about the Night’s Watch riding out to fight the War for the Dawn, both of which make it seem like the person fighting the Others should be by themselves.  Perhaps the Night’s Watch did ride out to fight the Others with the Last Hero – but they might have all been undead or resurrected people.

And that makes a lot of sense, practically speaking – think about the unique skill set of the conscious undead, and how perfectly is tailored to the needs of journeying into the frozen dead lands to face the Others.  Coldhands doesn’t have to worry about sleep or food – neither does Mel or Beric, for that matter – and Coldhands is impervious to cold, and Melisandre seems to be as well, although for different reasons.  Whether these twelve undead companions of the Last Hero were reanimated by ice or by fire, they have specific attributes which would be very, very useful for anyone trying to do what the Last Hero and his party were doing.  And again, this is most likely what Jon is headed for – some kind of undead, resurrected state.  And Jon may very well be playing the role of the Last Hero.  If the original Last Hero was resurrected too, then it all fits pretty well, with the future echoing the past.

The last thing I’ll say about this is that the three people I cited as examples – Coldhands, Beric, and Melisandre – all have access to magic.  Beric is the least magical, but he lights his sword on fire with his own black blood.  Melisandre is a given; birthing shadow babies and burning eagles out of the sky is proof of potent magic.  Coldhands, meanwhile, communicates with the ravens and the great elk.  The elk should be afraid of his corpse stink, but instead he obeys Coldhands, even after they split up – the elk takes the children to a predetermined location of Coldhands’ choosing.  The ravens flock to him at night as if he were a weirwood tree, and he’s communicating with them in a few scenes as well.  They attack the wights in concert with Coldhands’s rescue of Sam and Gilly.  Coldhands is acting like a powerful skinchanger or greenseer – except he’s undead.  And no, I absolutely do not buy even the possibility that he’s being skin changed by Bloodraven.  What we can conclude from all this is that resurrected or transformed states of being do not seem to decrease one’s magic.  If you think about it, this makes a lot sense – resurrected Jon is probably going to need more magic at his disposal, not less.

I’ve actually got a lot of notes and evidence gathered on this specific topic, and it’s one of the ones we’ll be turning to in the fairly near future as I pivot from all the Azor Ahai stuff over to greenseers and skinchangers and weirwoods.  That’s right, we will eventually be talking about things other than Lightbringer and moon meteors.

To finish up the sun-turning ideas, I’ll toss you some lighter fare, something fun to break up all the bloodshed.  There exists a modern device called a heliotrope that uses mirrors to reflect sunlight over great distances to mark the positions of participants in a land survey.  This device uses regular mirrors, not mirrors made from actual heliotrope – rather, it’s the “sun-mirror” connotations of heliotrope they were naming the instrument for.  This calls to mind the tale of Serwyn of the Mirror Shield, who slew the dragon Urrax with a spear throw to the eye after using his shield as a mirror, a trick which seems to be drawn from the slaying of the serpent-goddess Medusa of Greek mythology, where Perseus used a similar mirror-shield trick to turn the Medusa to stone with her own reflection.   Even without the bloodstone – sun-mirror idea in mind, it’s easy to see why George might use the Medusa story as inspiration, since it has a goddess turning into a stone snake with more than one head.  The story of Serwyn is actually a detailed celestial metaphor with direct relevance to the Azor Ahai legend, as we will show in a future essay.  There’s also a moment in the Oberyn vs. Mountain fight where Oberyn uses the sun-mirror trick – that’s absolutely not a coincidence, as we will see when I break down that scene.  We also saw this symbol in the eye of Dany’s dragons, which can be like polished shields or mirrors.   Naturally, those mirrors reflect only blood and fire.

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Purple Flowers and Poison Kisses

The term “heliotropism” is used to describe certain species of flowering plants (genus heliotropium in particular) which turn their flowers to face the sun as it moves throughout the day.  The concept of the heliotropic plant is another application of the idea of “sun turning” (remember that “heliotrope” is made up of root words which mean “sun” and “to turn”).  In this case, the heliotrope flowers are turning towards the sun, the better to drink the sunlight, instead of bending, refracting, or darkening the sunlight.

There is actually a Greek myth behind this idea, that of the Okeanid Nymph Klytie, who along with her six Okeanid sisters, were goddesses of the clouds and fresh water.  Klytie was loved by the sun-god Helios, but after he left her for the “white goddess” Leucothea, a sea goddess, Klytie pined away for Helios for nine days, lying on the ground and turning her head to follow the sun in its course through the sky until her limbs took root and she was transformed into the sun-gazing flower, the heliotrope.  It’s important to note that this myth puts the heliotrope in the role of the female lover of the sun god, which in our celestial model, would be represented by the moon goddess, who was indeed a sun-drinker.  The idea of a moon turning to follow the sun which leads to transofHelios, the sun god, even loves and leaves her for another – that sounds like the part of the Qarthine legend that prophesies that one day the other moon will kiss the sun too.  The sun is supposed to have two wives, two moons, after all, so this is a convenient Greek myth for George to rope into his bloodstone lore. It’s likely he chose bloodstone for some of the reasons listed above – the martyr’s stone idea, most of all – but having done so, he likely would have noticed the Greek myth of Klytie the heliotrope, since it fits so conveniently into his “sun god with two wives” motif.

Now that we

There’s another reason I can confidently say that the heliotropium plants have been part of George’s thinking since the very beginning of the first book.  Why do I say this?  Well, one of the plants in genus heliotropium is called a “valerian” – you might have caught your spellcheck trying to change “Valyrian” to this word, in fact.  The valerian plant has flowers which are – and you’re going to like this – purple.  Well, white or pink or purple, but still – valerians have purple flowers, and they are heliotropes.  Daenerys is the character in the main story who most prominently symbolizes the second moon, and she is of course a Valyrian with purple eyes.  The Amethyst Empress, another symbol of the second moon, is obviously associated with purple via her name.  The idea of the purple valerian flower being a type of heliotropium might suggest that the Valyrians are descended from the Bloodstone Emperor, the Amethyst Empress, or both – and I actually have suggested that very idea in another essay, which will actually be the basis for an upcoming joint podcast between the mythical astronomy of ice and fire and the History of Westeros podcast – that will probably be the next episode you will see after this one, so look out for that.  Interestingly, the purple variety of valerian is also called the Jacob’s Ladder, tying in to the theme of men who challenge god and seek to gain access to the heavens.  I don’t mean to make too much of this, but it just kind of shows how naturally the heliotrope / bloodstone lore fits into the themes and ideas George was already working with.

In other words, “where did George get the idea for the name of the Valyrians?” The answer is, from the heliotrope flower.

The thing I’m trying to emphasize is that it would seem he had the bloodstone / heliotrope / valerian connections in mind before he began writing the story.  That fits with my general premise of these essays, that George has had a kind of master plan or pattern from the beginning which he has hidden in metaphor in every book, one based on the forging of Lightbringer / Long Night disaster.

Early on in A Game of Thrones, there’s another amusing clue  that George was thinking about heliotrope as both flower and bloodstone from the very start.  The party from Winterfell is making it’s way down the Kingsroad through the Neck, and Arya muddies herself collecting purple and green flowers for Ned.  She earns praise  from Ned and makes Sansa wroth.  But there’s a catch:

Then it turned out the purple flowers were called poison kisses, and Arya got a rash on her arms.

The forging of Lightbringer is also a procreative act, but one that poisons the moon rock – thus, “poison kisses” are a perfect description of what is going on here.  A snakebite is a poison kiss, in other words, and these black bloodstone meteors are like poisonous snakes.  But poison kisses can also be purple flowers as we see here, which makes perfect sense when you discover the heliotrope connections.  In fact, real heliotropium plants are actually toxic to people and animals.  Personally, I’m impressed with the creativity on display here by the author, weaving these ideas together in a way that makes terrific sense and creates compelling imagery.  To drive the point home, the paragraph above continues on to say that Arya had purple welts and bruises on her body, which of course she received from sword-fighting practice with Micah.  The purple bruises left by a sword parallel the purple flowers that leave a rash, and tie the poison purple flowers to swords striking maidens.  Swords and poisonous purple flowers alike leave a mark on moon maidens.

In A Dance with Dragons, we see a follow-up to this scene as Theon goes to Moat Cailin to deceive the remaining Ironborn there.  This is near where Arya found the poison kisses.  Theon is essentially receiving a scrolling tour of Lightbringer symbols as he rides down the causeway through the swamp:

The swampy ground beyond the causeway was impassable, an endless morass of suckholes, quicksands, and glistening green swards that looked solid to the unwary eye but turned to water the instant you trod upon them, the whole of it infested with venomous serpents and poisonous flowers and monstrous lizard lions with teeth like daggers. Just as dangerous were its people, seldom seen but always lurking, the swamp-dwellers, the frog-eaters, the mud-men.  . . . The ironborn called them all bog devils.

I believe this is yet another case of George using a favorite technique: listing several things which seem separate but are really all describing the same thing.  Everything in the bog represents a different aspect of the Lightbringer meteors, that’s my hypothesis.  There are five things in the swamp: poisonous serpents, poisonous flowers, lizard lions, bog devils, and the black stones of Moat Cailin.  Poisonous serpents and flowers are two meteor symbols we have just examined in the previous scene with Arya and the poisons kisses and the section about Lightbringer the poisonous snake, so it’s nice to see them hear side by side to emphasize the connection.   The lizard-lions fit right in, because the sun is chiefly depicted as a lion or a dragon, and here we get a bit of both, with the lizard suggesting the dragon.  The teeth described as daggers matches exactly the description of the teeth of dragons.  The dragon’s teeth are a natural fit for a moon meteor metaphor, and are described as being like black diamonds.  Diamond are usually equated with stars, so black diamonds give us the dark-star motif again.  Blackness and starlight, black falling stars that bite and poison – that’s how I am seeing these bloodstone meteors.  Next we have the bog devils – the are devils who blow poison darts… that’s simple enough.

Finally, for the fifth and final thing in the swamp, we have the black stones of Moat Cailin.  This quote is from just before the previous one:

Where once a mighty curtain wall had stood, only scattered stones remained, blocks of black basalt so large it must once have taken a hundred men to hoist them into place. Some had sunk so deep into the bog that only a corner showed; others lay strewn about like some god’s abandoned toys, cracked and crumbling, spotted with lichen. Last night’s rain had left the huge stones wet and glistening, and the morning sunlight made them look as if they were coated in some fine black oil.

Moat Cailin is made from black basalt, which like obsidian, is a lava-rock, for what it’s worth.  It’s a different sort of frozen fire, in that sense.  But the stones of Moat Cailin might also fall into the class of “oily stone” buildings with Asshai, Yeen, the Isle of Toads, and the Seastone Chair, based on this quote.  It’s inconclusive because the rain is helping to create the image of oily stone.  It’s interesting that Yeen and Moat Cailin have the same style of construction – enormous, square hewn blocks of black stone.  However, whether or not the black stones of Moat Cailin are actually oily black stone – and therefore, according to my theory, meteorite stone – they are being used to symbolize them here.  Some god’s abandoned toys – that’s a great description.  It may be that George calls them oily looking here just for the metaphorical purpose of using the black stones as symbols for moon meteors, but whatever the case, god’s abandoned toys are oily black stones.  Even better, it is the sunlight hitting the stone which makes them look oily.  The sun is the one who poisoned the moon and created the black bloodstones.

There’s actually a couple more Lightbringer symbols in the swamp, but it would take to long too explain here because I need to introduce other concepts for them to make sense, so we’ll save those for another time.  However, in the next paragraph after seeing all the things in the swamp, we get this:

Closer to the towers, corpses littered the ground on every side. Blood-blooms had sprouted from their gaping wounds, pale flowers with petals plump and moist as a woman’s lips.

According to the wiki of Ice and Fire, these blood-blooms are apparently actual flowers that grow from corpses.  That’s flowers, that grow from corpses, with leaves that are the color of blood and look like woman’s lips.  The lips evoke the poison kisses and the procreative theme of Lightbringer’s forging.  The blood flowers symbolize post-moon explosion flowers, the bloodstones, and so they are the color of blood.  The bloodstone meteors pour forth from the moon goddess’ corpse, just as the blood flowers grow from the corpses here.

And of course, I have to mention the mention of the Hammer of the Waters, which comes immediately after these paragraphs.  Theon remembers that the children supposedly called down the Hammer from the Children’s Tower, which now has a broken crown, appropriately.  It’s described thusly in A Game of Thrones when they pass through the first time:

It looked as if some great beast had taken a bite out of the crenellations along the tower top, and spit the rubble across the bog.

Are these black oily stones in the bog some god’s abandoned toys, or are they the spittle of a great beast?  Again, I think the answer is “all of the above.”  The idea of the black stones as being spit from the mouth of a great beast hearkens back to the general motif of things in the mouth or coming from the mount as representing meteors, such as dragon flame and dragon’s teeth, the darts of the bog-devils, fiery or bloody tongues, etc.

What I love about all the symbolism around Moat Cailin and the Children’s tower is how consistent and tight it is.  The language in books one and five match each other and work together.  You can more or less put together the whole thing with just Moat Cailin clues.  The Hammer of the Waters is when some great beast of a diety bit the top off a tower and spit the poisonous black stones across the planet.  The children’s tower is described as slender and spear-like, calling to mind the slender-as-a-spear maidens we see from time to time and associating the children’s tower with a maiden, as it should since it’s broken crown represents the broken moon.  And I can’t help but remember the idea of Nissa Nissa as a children of the forest, via the “helpful elf” translation of Nissa that we looked at last time… this idea is tantalizing but needs further investigation.

Returning to Ned’s dream recall of the Tower of Joy, consider again the storm of flower petals in the bloody sky.  This image takes on new meaning, in light of these connections – if we are symbolizing the moon goddess as a flower, then the pieces of the flower, blown about in a storm, are the pieces of the moon – the moon meteors.  Appropriately, they appear in a blood-streaked sky.  Of course, we have a parallel heliotrope symbol to this already at the Tower of Joy – the bloody stones used to make cairns.  That’s pretty awesome, the sun-drinking moon flowers and the bloody stones both represented at the Tower of Joy, the birthplace of the reborn black dragon.

As for Jon himself, he’s Nissa Nissa reborn (or in this case Lyanna reborn) just as much as he is Azor Ahai or Rhaegar reborn, so it’s cool to see the more feminine flower symbol together with the more masculine, dragon-like bloody stones symbol at the place of his birth.  Jon’s personal symbolism matches this as well.  When Dany sees the blue rose in the chink in the Wall which fills the air with sweetness in her House of the Undying vision, it’s pretty clear that it represents Jon Snow – specifically Jon’s Stark heritage through his moon mother Lyanna.  Jon also has the black ice / red fire and dragon symbolism from his solar king father, Rhaegar.

Now, think about the moon as a heliotrope flower, turning to follow the sun and experiencing some kind of transformation as Klytie the Greek goddess did.  The transformation cycles in A Song of Ice and Fire which we have looked at involve the life and death cycle, represented by darkness and light.  We’ve seen the heliotrope moon turn the sun dark, triggering the solar king death and resurrection cycle, and the moon itself transforms and turns black as it is burnt by the Lightbringer comet.  So, what is the phrase Martin has chosen to describe the passage of one month?  That’s right, a moon’s turn… you saw that one coming, didn’t you?  A moon’s turn is when the moon goes through one cycle, from full and bright to a black hole and back again.  And now you know why he calls it that!  Naturally, a woman’s moon blood comes once a month or so… once every moon’s turn.

Now, in the interest full disclosure, moon blood can be quite terrifying and you better give it some respect.  Here’s Jamie in A Storm of Swords:

“Oh, very good.” Jaime laughed. “Your wits are quicker than mine, I confess it. When they found me standing over my dead king, I never thought to say, ‘No, no, it wasn’t me, it was a shadow, a terrible cold shadow.’ ” He laughed again. “Tell me true, one kingslayer to another— did the Starks pay you to slit his throat, or was it Stannis? Had Renly spurned you, was that the way of it? Or perhaps your moon’s blood was on you. Never give a wench a sword when she’s bleeding.” 

For sure, don’t give moon maidens a sword when their moon blood is on them, that can lead to the near destruction of the entire world, and also to the Long Night.  Unfortunately, Jamie doesn’t take his own advice, and this is also from A Storm of Swords:

He undid his breeches and climbed up and pushed her bare white legs apart. One hand slid up her thigh and underneath her smallclothes. When he tore them away, he saw that her moon’s blood was on her, but it made no difference.

Jamie is a solar king, so he just can’t help himself from giving bloody moon maidens “the sword.”  On the grisly side of things, this is the notorious sex scene which takes place in the sept where Joffrey’s dead body lies in wake.  As with dead baby Rhaego, we see the son of the sun is a dead person when Lightbringer is forged.  Also, Jamie literally puts Cersei on the altar of the Mother while this goes down – as if Cersei were a bloody moon sacrifice, which is exactly what she is.   Sacrifice and procreation, together again like the best friends that we know them to be.

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Sansa Stark Explains her Moon Blood

Once again, I’ve buried the lead.  This blood blooms we just saw aren’t the half of it, when it comes to bloody moon flowers.  Consider: when a Westerosi maiden gets her moon blood, she is said to have flowered.  When a maiden loses her virginity, when her “maidenhead” is broken and bleeds, she is said to be “deflowered.”  It’s kind of a bad joke, but it’s great symbolism, and directly tied to the heliotropium flower / bloodstone concept.

Check out the very memorable scene of Sansa receiving her first moon blood in A Clash of Kings.  She’s been dreaming of the riot at Kings Landing, and in the dream, the mob is tearing her apart, and that’s where I am picking up the quote:

Then she saw the bright glimmer of steel. The knife plunged into her belly and tore and tore and tore, until there was nothing left of her down there but shiny wet ribbons.

When she woke, the pale light of morning was slanting through her window, yet she felt as sick and achy as if she had not slept at all. There was something sticky on her thighs. When she threw back the blanket and saw the blood, all she could think was that her dream had somehow come true. She remembered the knives inside her, twisting and ripping. She squirmed away in horror, kicking at the sheets and falling to the floor, breathing raggedly, naked, bloodied, and afraid.

George has given us a nice connection between the flowering / moon blood motifs and the moon maiden stabbing of the Lightbringer story by depicting Sansa’s flowering as a knife stabbing.  The sexual violence implied here calls to mind the procreation / death dual nature of the Lightbringer metaphor.  The “bright” steel “glimmers” and the blood is “shiny,” evoking Lightbringer, while the knife “plunges” and Sansa falls to the floor to evoke the falling bits of moon.  The Lightbringer symbolism continues through the scene:

Madness took hold of her. Pulling herself up by the bedpost, she went to the basin and washed between her legs, scrubbing away all the stickiness. By the time she was done, the water was pink with blood. When her maidservants saw it they would know. Then she remembered the bedclothes. She rushed back to the bed and stared in horror at the dark red stain and the tale it told. All she could think was that she had to get rid of it, or else they’d see. She couldn’t let them see, or they’d marry her to Joffrey and make her lay with him.

Snatching up her knife, Sansa hacked at the sheet, cutting out the stain. If they ask me about the hole, what will I say? Tears ran down her face. She pulled the torn sheet from the bed, and the stained blanket as well. I’ll have to burn them. She balled up the evidence, stuffed it in the fireplace, drenched it in oil from her bedside lamp, and lit it afire. Then she realized that the blood had soaked through the sheet into the featherbed, so she bundled that up as well, but it was big and cumbersome, hard to move. Sansa could get only half of it into the fire. She was on her knees, struggling to shove the mattress into the flames as thick grey smoke eddied around her and filled the room, when the door burst open and she heard her maid gasp.

Starting from the beginning of this section, we see the bloody moon maiden immersing herself and creating bloody water, matching the bloodstone association with a bloody stone submersed in water and the idea of a moon maiden drowning.  A bit later in this scene, Sansa again washes herself in a tub of “scalding hot water,” evoking the moon drowning again, and it seems notable that the TWOIAF version of the Qarthine origin of dragons story says the moon was “scalded” by the sun’s heat.  I wouldn’t base an entire theory on one word connection like this, but since it fits with all the other symbolism, I’m inclined to think the word “scalding” is chosen intentionally, but who knows.

Next we see a dark red stain, which is cut out from the sheet, leaving a hole.  Sounds very like a bloody moon which was cut out of the sky, leaving a hole, as we just saw with the black hole moon.  The bloody sheets and blankets are then balled up, to make them more moon-like I suppose, before being shoved in the fire.  That’s blood and fire, our favorite recipe.  Next, the burning of the moon blood fills the room with thick grey smoke.  This seems like a pretty clear allusion to the smokey haze which caused the sun to be hidden during the Long Night, a smoke that came from a burning and bloody moon which was cut out of the sky.  Last but not least, we hear a maid gasp, which seems a likely shout-out to moon maiden Nissa’s Nissa’s scream of anguish and ecstasy which left a crack across the face of the moon.

Just in case you were wondering whether or not the astronomical symbolism ever manifests in the form of food symbolism… I’d have to say yes.  When Sansa gets cleaned up, she dines with Cersei, who serves her porridge and milk (ok, no big deal) as well as boiled eggs (oh my) and crisp fried fish (dun dun dun).  The boiled eggs suggest eggs which are both heated and submersed, like dragon’s eggs meteors which land in the sea – the sea dragon.  A dragon which swims in the sea is a kind of fish, as I mentioned last time while discussing the fishy nature of dragons in Chinese mythology, so fried fish again gives us a burning sea dragon.  Even better, or worse as it may happen, the sight of the food makes Sansa feel ill, a reference to the poisoning of the moon and snake venom.  Looking at sea dragons makes moon maiden Sansa feel sick, as well it should.  The sea dragon is really the same image created by moon maiden Sansa taking a bloody bath – drowning moon meteors.

To finish up here, George seems to be making a point about the dark nature of Lightbringer.  First, here’s a mention of the smoke having ruined Sansa’s clothing.  The moon’s clothing would be her crust, her outer shell, and it is from here that we would get the stony meteors.  These are the poisoned and poisonous black bloodstone meteors, which are all about defilement and corruption, and so Sansa’s clothing being ruined by the smoke seems a reference to this idea.  Then there’s this exchange with Cersei, after Sansa refuses the sea dragon food:

“I don’t blame you. Between Tyrion and Lord Stannis, everything I eat tastes of ash. And now you’re setting fires as well. What did you hope to accomplish?”

Sansa lowered her head. “The blood frightened me.”

“The blood is the seal of your womanhood. Lady Catelyn might have prepared you. You’ve had your first flowering, no more.” Sansa had never felt less flowery.

The moon blood frightens, and Sansa doesn’t feel flowery – more reference to the ominous nature of Lightbringer’s forging.  The moon is setting fires, and Azor Ahai stand-in King Stannis is also filling the air with ash as he lays siege to King’s Landing with his fiery heart.  Again and again, we are being told that moon burning brings smoke and ash, that Lightbringer-wielding dudes bring smoke and ash.  We are being shown that poison and sickness and corruption come with these moon meteors which represent Lightbringer.  The chapter closes with a fantastic ramming home of these points:

Robert wanted to be loved. My brother Tyrion has the same disease. Do you want to be loved, Sansa?”

“Everyone wants to be loved.”

“I see flowering hasn’t made you any brighter,” said Cersei. “Sansa, permit me to share a bit of womanly wisdom with you on this very special day. Love is poison. A sweet poison, yes, but it will kill you all the same.”

It’s a wonderful expression of the duality of the Lightbringer myth: love is poison.  Compare that to the poison kisses flowers which we saw a moment ago.  Birth and death, bloody beds and bloody battle, bloody swords and bloody cocks, sex and swordplay.  The sun loved the moon, and also poisoned the moon.  And the moon’s flowering hasn’t made her any brighter – no, quite the opposite.  I love that line.  The flowering of the second moon brought darkness, fire, and blood.  That’s one of the fun parts of following George’s mythical astronomy – he leaves these little inside jokes which you only get if you understand the astronomy side of things.  George wrote these jokes years ago, almost two decades in some cases, and here we are chuckling at them.

Recappping the chain of symbols in this scene, moon maiden Sansa “had the knives inside her,” which is very like having the “fire inside you.” Those bright glimmering knives tore at her insides and triggered the moon blood, which creates a bloody bed.  The bloody moon maiden then immerses herself in water, creating the sea dragon moon meteor motif.  Sansa cuts the dark red moon blood out of the bed, leaving a bloody hole, then balls up the moon blood, coats it with oil – there’s a tremendous oily black stone reference – and burns it, filling the air with thick grey smoke.

I must admit, it feels funny to say “look, George was giving us the answer to the Long Night all along in this scene about Sansa’s period,” but yeah, there it is.  I’m officially making that claim.  If you want to understand the moon blood and the Long Night, you have to ask Sansa.

There’s actually some really great set-up for this whole scene earlier in the chapter which simply adds to the richness of this metaphor.  I skipped over it before so that I could get right to the point with the flowering, but having done so, let’s go back the night before Sansa has her terrifying dream and burns all her sheets and caused a Long Night:

Turning back to the stair, Sansa climbed.  The smoke blotted out the stars and the thin crescent of moon, so the roof was dark and thick with shadows. Yet from here she could see everything: the Red Keep’s tall towers and great cornerforts, the maze of city streets beyond, to south and west the river running black, the bay to the east, the columns of smoke and cinders, and fires, fires everywhere.  Soldiers crawled over the city walls like ants with torches, and crowded the hoardings that had sprouted from the ramparts.

Sansa the heliotrope moon “turns,” and then Stannis’s smoke blots out the stars and the.. wait, was that a thin crescent moon?  Right before all the moon blood?  And what’s this about the black water?  I kid, but of course this is densely packed symbolism, yet it is familiar to us.  The moon sacrifice symbol appears with the smoke that blots out the stars and fires everywhere.  As a result, the top of the tower – where Sansa the moon maiden is, looking down on the world like a goddess – is now thick with shadow.

Next, Sansa sees three catapults – think of the three heads of the dragon motif applying to moon meteors, since catapults are for flinging rocks.  They don’t make Sansa feel “any less fearful,” however, just as the moon blood frightens Sansa. Then, we get this:

A stab went through her, so sharp that Sansa sobbed and clutched at her belly. She might have fallen, but a shadow moved suddenly, and strong fingers grabbed her arm and steadied her.

That’s all pretty clear moon maiden stuff – Sansa is atop the tower, she sees the crescent moon blotted out, gets stabbed and cries, and then we see the idea of falling implied, just as we saw with the rumor that Sansa turned into a winged wolf and flew out of the tower after the purple wedding.  When this happens, a shadow moves suddenly.  In this scene Sandor is saving Sansa from falling, but that seems more a part of the logistics of the scene than anything metaphorical.  The actual moon did fall – we know that – even though it’s only an almost-fall in this scene.  But a paragraph or two later, there’s more metaphor:

“You were glad enough to see my face when the mob had you, though. Remember?”

Sansa remembered all too well. She remembered the way they had howled, the feel of the blood running down her cheek from where the stone had struck her, and the garlic stink on the breath of the man who had tried to pull her from her horse. She could still feel the cruel pinch of fingers on her wrist as she lost her balance and began to fall.

She’d thought she was going to die then, but the fingers had twitched, all five at once, and the man had shrieked loud as a horse. When his hand fell away, another hand, stronger, shoved her back into her saddle. The man with the garlicky breath was on the ground, blood pumping out the stump of his arm, but there were others all around, some with clubs in hand. The Hound leapt at them, his sword a blur of steel that trailed a red mist as it swung. When they broke and ran before him he had laughed, his terrible burned face for a moment transformed.

This is some great stuff here, because the one who pulls down the moon maiden gets his hand chopped off – that’s our fiery hand of R’hllor, whose fingers are like fiery spears.  I listed some of the relevant burned hands earlier when we talked about the leaves of the weirwood being either bloody hands or bits of flame, and this is more of the same.  Right before the hand pulls her down, she is struck by a rock, and bleeds.  The blood runs down her cheek, evoking the bloody tears.  She’s even wearing a moonstone hairnet in this scene, which parallels the poison amethyst medusa hairnet she wears at the purple wedding, when Sansa kills the solar king she was supposed to marry.  It’s pretty much all there – the moon maiden stuff is really vivid in this chapter.

I think this scene makes the relationship between Sansa and the Hound clear – after Sansa almost falls, again, the Hound appears, again.  I think the Hound, who was a shadow earlier on top of the tower, represents Azor Ahai reborn, the child of son and moon death.  In this memory of the riot, the Hound has a transformed, burned face and a blurry sword that trails a red mist, a perfect match for Azor Ahai reborn and Lightbringer.  A sword trailing blood makes us think of the bleeding star, the red comet, whose tail is perceived as a trail of blood.  The red mist coming from a sword also ties in to the rain of blood motif, which we saw with the Doom’s rain of black blood and the Valyrian steel sword “Red Rain.”  This is another nice link between Lightbringer and Valyrian steel – many of the names of Valyrian steel swords seem to describe Lightbringer and it’s effects, such as Red Rain, Nightfall, Blackfyre, Heartsbane, Brightroar, Orphanmaker, and Longclaw, while others seem to describe the sacrificed moon, such as Dark Sister, Lady Forlorn, Widow’s Wail, and Lamentation.  The red mist trailing from the Hound’s sword also implies the boiling and steaming blood which is the hallmark of Lightbringer transformation, just as we saw in Dany’s dragon dream of fire transformation where her blood turns to steam or when Azor Ahai fought a monster and boiled its insides. Remember also that the bloody skulls in Mel’s visions dissolved into mist.  And here, the Hound’s fiery face is transformed, just to re-emphasize the fire transformation aspect of the Lightbringer process.

Thinking again about the hand which tries to pull  Sansa down, notice that when the bloody hand goes away, the Hound’s stronger hand replaces it – just as Azor Ahai reborn replaces Azor Ahai.   Sansa starts out riding a chestnut mare – a reddish horse, in other words – but the Hound puts Sansa on a black horse, symbolizing the transformation of the moon into those black moon meteors, and paralleling another moon maiden with a black mount, Dany with Drogon.  Even better, the horse is called Stranger, and the Stranger of the Faith of the Seven is called “the wanderer from far places,” which is of course a way of describing a comet, a wandering star from far places.  One that is a messenger of death, like the Stranger and like the ravens.

I think all of these clues make it easy to identify Sandor in these scenes.  George is using Sansa as the moon maiden, and the Hound as the reborn solar warrior.  He’s a hellhound, basically, which like the poison snake, is one aspect of Lightbringer and Azor Ahai reborn.  It’s interesting to think about the hellhound as a guardian of the moon, or as an agent of vengeance – Sandor fills both of these rolls for Sansa.  We’ll talk more about the Stranger and about hellhounds in the future, but let’s stick with bloody moon flowers for now.

It may seem odd to suggest that Sansa is playing the role of Sandor’s mother… until you consider the song she chose to sing for him the night he fled from King’s Landing: “Gentle mother, font of mercy, save our sons from war we pray…”  Sandor’s appearance in that scene is consistent with Azor Ahai reborn: he is burned of course, he has an iron grip, and he reeks of “blood, blood, blood.”   George is also using the description of Sansa’s tower room and the scene outside to slip us Long Night clues.  When she enters the room, it is “as black as pitch,” and then as she rips back the drapes, she sees that the “sky was aswirl with glowing shifting colors, the reflections of the great fires below,” and also “aswirl with fire” as men died “in their hundreds and their thousands.”  The orange and green flames “warred against each other,” with each “birthing armies of short-lived shadows to die again an instant later.” Then we read that “the air itself smelt burnt,” like a soup kettle “left on the fire too long and all the soup boiled away.”  Soup kettles are black iron in medieval life, so that’s black iron having its contents boiled away to make the atmosphere smell burnt.  Just like Sansa’s scalding bath and the boiled eggs she was offered, this is talking about boiling and scalding the moon.

I’ll pick up the text again here, because it’s just too good to summarize:

Then something stirred behind her, and a hand reached out of the dark and grabbed her wrist.

Sansa opened her mouth to scream, but another hand clamped down over her face, smothering her. His fingers were rough and callused, and sticky with blood. “Little bird. I knew you’d come.” The voice was a drunken rasp.

Outside, a swirling lance of jade light spit at the stars, filling the room with green glare. She saw him for a moment, all black and green, the blood on his face dark as tar, his eyes glowing like a dog’s in the sudden glare. Then the light faded and he was only a hulking darkness in a stained white cloak.

“If you scream I’ll kill you. Believe that.” He took his hand from her mouth.

Well, it look alike George found a way to slip the black blood in there, as the Hound’s blood is as dark as tar.  His eyes glow like a dog’s eyes – like a fiery hellhound’s eyes, I would say.  “Then the light faded, and he was only a hulking darkness” – that’s pretty great right there – Lightbringer is a hulking darkness.  Sandor was a quick moving shadow atop the tower earlier, and in this scene his hand comes from the dark as well.  I mentioned that earlier Sandor’s has an iron grip, so let’s consider all the descriptions of his hands – they are covered in blood, they are like iron, and they reach out of the shadow.  Blood and night and steel, the familiar motif.  Sandor’s stained white cloak might refer to the idea of Lightbringer the sword being white hot and the comet being white and blue before the forging in the heart of the moon maiden, and the idea of Dawn representing an undefiled Lightbringer sword.  In any case, it effectively communicates the idea of Lightbringer being soiled and stained and defiled.

The threat to kill the moon maiden goes along with the idea of her screaming, just as Nissa Nissa’s cry of anguish and ecstasy left a crack across the face of the moon.

There are some greenseer ideas here I am not ready to dive into yet, but take note of the swirling lance of jade light that is spit at the stars – this could be a reference to the idea of greenseers calling down the Hammer of the Waters.  Renly’s stag on his golden crown is made of jade – the colors of Highgarden – and therefore evoke the idea of Garth the Green, who might have had antlers on his head like a stag, an image which is recreated when one of the Baratheons dons their antlered helm.

There’s just a bit more to quote from this scene:

The Hound laughed. “I only know who’s lost. Me.”

He is drunker than I’ve ever seen him. He was sleeping in my bed. What does he want here? “What have you lost?”

“All.” The burnt half of his face was a mask of dried blood. “Bloody dwarf. Should have killed him. Years ago.”

“He’s dead, they say.”

“Dead? No. Bugger that. I don’t want him dead.” He cast the empty flagon aside. “I want him burned. If the gods are good, they’ll burn him, but I won’t be here to see. I’m going.” 

Azor Ahai reborn is the wanderer from far places, or the red wanderer.  Sandor, accordingly, is lost, and has lost all.  I think this is consistent with the idea that being Azor Ahai reborn is not necessarily great deal of fun, as Jon discovered in his Azor Ahai dream, where he feels abandoned and alone.  The highlight of this part is that Sandor was sleeping the bed of the moon maiden.  This is a direct parallel to the idea of Jon Snow emerging from Lyanna’s bed of blood.  The bed was even specifically made into a burning moon blood symbol when Sansa bled upon the bed – making it a bloody bed – and then burned it.  And again, all this at the top of a tower.  The Hound’s face is a mask of dried black blood, which sounds a lot like Beric’s face, which was called a “death mask,” or like Quaithe’s red lacquer mask.

Tyrion, of the likely heads of the dragon, gets a shout out here as a bloody dwarf that Sandor wants to see burn.  Sansa thinks he’s dead, then Sandor says no, implying resurrection or an undead state.  Tyrion has a symbolically rich dream of being dead after he’s knocked unconscious in this battle, but we don’t have time for that here.  If Tyrion is in fact half Targaryen, and that’s a theory I tend to believe in, he’s part lion and part dragon, a perfect solar symbol.  His green and black eyes might be referring to the same motif that Sandor’s momentary green-and-black appearance we saw a moment ago refers to.  When Renly was killed in the tent by Stannis’s shadowsword, it was described as black on green.  The targaryen civil war was the blacks vs. the greens.  I think I know what all of this means, but I’ll have to save it for another time.

I’d like to thank my fellow blogger Sweetsunray of the Mythological Weave of Ice and Fire blog for the tip-off about this earlier part of Sansa’s moon blood chapter atop the tower.  She just caught this and brought it to my attention as I was recording and I just barely squeezed it in.  She’s got some really fabulous essays on the Cthonic underworld realms in ASOIAF, as well as a study of Lyanna as Persephone, an abducted moon goddess which I highly recommend.

There’s another appearance of the  the moon as a flower motif at the birthing of the shadow baby in A Clash of Kings.  Melisandre represents the destroyed second moon, the mother of Lightbringer, as we’ve seen before.  She’s been impregnated by Stannis – who’s playing the role of Azor Ahai of course – and she’s going to give birth to the shadow baby, which represents Lightbringer.  Notice that it’s actually the moon which gives light – temporarily, as it explodes – and Lightbringer which is made of darkness.

There was no answer but a soft rustling. And then a light bloomed amidst the darkness.

Davos raised a hand to shield his eyes, and his breath caught in his throat. Melisandre had thrown back her cowl and shrugged out of the smothering robe. Beneath, she was naked, and huge with child. Swollen breasts hung heavy against her chest, and her belly bulged as if near to bursting. “Gods preserve us,” he whispered, and heard her answering laugh, deep and throaty. Her eyes were hot coals, and the sweat that dappled her skin seemed to glow with a light of its own. Melisandre shone.

Panting, she squatted and spread her legs. Blood ran down her thighs, black as ink. Her cry might have been agony or ecstasy or both. And Davos saw the crown of the child’s head push its way out of her. Two arms wriggled free, grasping, black fingers coiling around Melisandre’s straining thighs, pushing, until the whole of the shadow slid out into the world and rose taller than Davos, tall as the tunnel, towering above the boat. He had only an instant to look at it before it was gone, twisting between the bars of the portcullis and racing across the surface of the water, but that instant was long enough. He knew that shadow. As he knew the man who’d cast it.

We looked at the Lightbringer symbolism here last time – the agony and ecstasy phrase which matches Nissa Nissa’s cry of anguish and ecstasy, the light in the darkness motif, the fire transformation with burning blood, etc.  The word I am focusing on here is “bloomed” – this is the moon’s light blooming like a flower.  Not Lightbringer, Lightbringer’s mother.  The moon maiden, in the moment that she gives birth to Lightbringer, shines.  Attention is drawn to it – they are in a dark cave, and her skin is literally shining.  She’s pregnant near to bursting – she couldn’t possibly eat another mint, even if it is wafer-thin.  That’s all quite vivid – a moon bursting open, creating momentary light, giving birth to black shadow children.  That moon was a bright flower before she died, before she drank too much of the sunlight.  As Salladhor Saan says to Davos in A Clash of Kings, “Too much light can hurt the eyes, my friend, and fire burns.”

Notice that Lightbringer the black shadow looks just like his father, “Azor Ahai as played by Stannis Baratheon.”  He even has a crown of shadow and towers above the boat – there’s our shadow tower motif again.  But while his father is a living person and a king, the son is a black shadow version of the father.  That’s the family portrait here – the sun dies, and is reborn as a black shadow sun, a night sun. That’s our Bloodstone Emperor, King of the Nightlands.

The Ghost of High Heart, who sees everything and everyone in terms of symbols and sigils, describes Stannis’s shadow baby assassin thusly in A Storm of Swords:

“I dreamt I saw a shadow with a burning heart butchering a golden stag, aye.”

As we can see, the burning heart and the black shadow are core elements of Azor Ahai reborn.  The fiery heart of the moon maiden becomes the the black shadow meteors, which are themselves fiery hearts that bring darkness and shadow.  We’ll get into Renly’s symbolism on a different occasion, but I will point out that the slaughtering of the “golden” stag describes the death of the golden sun.

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The Black Iron Rose of Spreading Darkness

We’ll wrap up this podcast with one last truly epic flower of darkness quote.  This scene takes place in A Game of Thrones, at the Battle of the Red Fork, better known as the fight where Tyrion fought with the mountain clans in his father’s army.  Tywin, as usual, plays the role of the sun:

Tywin Lannister’s battle armor put his son Jaime’s gilded suit to shame. His greatcloak was sewn from countless layers of cloth-of-gold, so heavy that it barely stirred even when he charged, so large that its drape covered most of his stallion’s hindquarters when he took the saddle. No ordinary clasp would suffice for such a weight, so the greatcloak was held in place by a matched pair of miniature lionesses crouching on his shoulders, as if poised to spring. Their mate, a male with a magnificent mane, reclined atop Lord Tywin’s greathelm, one paw raking the air as he roared.

His rondels were golden sunbursts, all his fastenings were gilded, and the red steel was burnished to such a high sheen that it shone like fire in the light of the rising sun.

The solar lion imagery is kind of hitting you over the head here, I’m you noticed that, but check out the really cool clue about idea of there being two moons.  The solar lion on the great helm has two lionesses – his is called “their mate.”  One sun, two moon wives, just like Aegon and Rhaegar and a few others I haven’t mentioned yet.

As the battle is about to begin, it starts to sound a little bit like the War for the Dawn:

Pale crimson fingers fanned out to the east as the first rays of the sun broke over the horizon. The western sky was a deep purple, speckled with stars. Tyrion wondered whether this was the last sunrise he would ever see …

A warhorn sounded in the far distance, a deep mournful note that chilled the soul. 

In this corner, we have a deep purple night, speckled with stars, and in this corner, we have the pale crimson fingers of dawn.  Gentlmen, I want a good clean fight. At the sound of my horn… aoooooo   aaaooooo aaaoooooooooo  I kid, but of course the speckled with stars phrase calls out to Lord Beric’s cloak, described in the exact same terms, and to the Bloodstone Emperor’s Starry Wisdom.  That’s on the opposite side of dawn, opposing dawn if you will.

Right after this, the rising sun creates an illusion with the dew on the grasses which seems to mirror the sky, and we’ll pick up the text here:

The clansmen climbed onto their scrawny mountain horses, shouting curses and rude jokes. Several appeared to be drunk. The rising sun was burning off the drifting tendrils of fog as Tyrion led them off. What grass the horses had left was heavy with dew, as if some passing god had scattered a bag of diamonds over the earth. The mountain men fell in behind him, each clan arrayed behind its own leaders.

In the dawn light, the army of Lord Tywin Lannister unfolded like an iron rose, thorns gleaming.

We’ll start with the divinely scattered diamonds, which evoke the meteor shower that came from the moon goddess, and this image is mirrored by the deep purple sky speckled with stars.  It also brings to mind the black stones of Moat Cailin, scattered like some god’s abandoned toys.  God sure throws a lot of stuff out of heaven, doesn’t he?  This illusion of diamonds scattered by a god is created by sunlight on wet blades of grass, connecting the fallen stars with shining blades.

There’s even a very clever sun-drinking idea here, spread across the end of one sentence and the beginning of the next.  One sentence ends by talking about the mountain men from the Mountains of the Moon, several of whom “appeared to be drunk.” The next sentence begins with “The rising sun…”  In other words, the mountain men appeared to drink the rising sun.  I’ve seen George do this kind of thing before, and in this case I think it is intentional because a moon associated thing is the exact right thing to be described as sun-drinking, and because we are in the middle of an astronomy metaphor.  There’s another one of these in the same paragraph: after the “like diamonds over the earth” sentence, the next sentence begins with “The mountain men fell in behind…”  This leaves us with the mountain men as another depiction of the meteors – falling mountains which drink the rising sun.  It may seem like a stretch, but don’t forget the names of those clans – moon brothers.  Burned men, led by the red hand.  Stone crows – that’s a really good one, and another nod to the ‘crows and ravens as meteors’ idea.  This is a good example of how George likes to use things like house sigils or clan names in complement with the action to build a larger metaphor.

And then, the payoff quote, and I’ll repeat it:  “In the dawn light, the army of Lord Tywin Lannister unfolded like an iron rose, thorns gleaming.”  Solar King Tywin’s army is his weapon, and it unfolds like a black iron rose.  A black iron weapon wielded by the sun symbolizes the the black steel of Lightbringer and the black meteors from which it was made (according to my theory, of course).  It also is a home-run reference to two important bloodstone concepts tied to the moon – the flower which drinks the sun’s light, and the stone which darkens the image of the sun.  And this coming after the clever mountain men “drinking the sun” reference.

The idea that the sun’s black weapon is both a black flower and a thing made of black iron basically seems like purely poetic language without the bloodstone ideas in mind, but makes perfect sense with them.  The moon was a sun-drinking flower that gave us black iron sun-drinking meteors to make swords out of.  Inside that iron flower, we find burned men and burned hands, stone crows, and sun-drinking moon brothers.

Even without the heliotropium flower ideas, roses can make an excellent comet symbol in their own right, as they have a round head and a long tail… and don’t forget those sharp thorns.  Thematically speaking, the thorns that prick and the connotations of love found in the rose are a good fit for expressing the procreation / death double meaning of Lightbringer.  We saw roses used as the moon flower of choice at the Tower of Joy with Lyanna’s storm of blue roses.  Those roses later “spilled from her palm, dead and black,” symbolizing death in general and the darkening of the moon’s blood and stone to black.  The sun-turning heliotrope flower of the Greek Klytie myth was purple; but our moon was transformed and burned by Lightbringer the comet to produce those black, sun-drinking bloodstone meteors, so it should now be represented by a black, sun-drinking flower.  Here we get the black iron rose, unfolding like a spreading darkness, a twin to Lyanna’ s dead black roses.

Tywin is no ordinary solar lion in this scene – he has become the Lion of Night, the night sun, wielder of “dark lightbringer,” if you know what I’m saying, and I know you do.  Just as Drogo let loose an oily black river of darkness, and Jon his rivers of black ice, Tywin has his black iron rose of spreading darkness.  These are the “waves of night” in the “waves of night and blood” motif, and of course they come from Lightbringer.

By way of teasing the upcoming episode on Ironborn mythology, I will leave you with this:

“And when battle was joined upon the shores, mighty kings and famous warriors fell before the reavers like wheat before a scythe, in such numbers that the men of the green lands told each other that the Ironborn were demons risen from some watery hell, protected by fell sorceries and possessed of foul black weapons that drank the very souls of those they slew.”  (TWOIAF, The Ironborn) 

Lightbringer drank Nissa Nissa’s soul – what are these Iron demons from hell doing with black swords that drink souls?

What does it all mean???

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Wow!  We did it!  All the mythical associations of bloodstone and heliotrope which I believe George R. R. Martin is making use of in his own mythology, and it only took five hours of podcasting to do it!  I wish you guys knew how hard it is to narrow down the choices of quotes to use.  The struggle is never to find enough examples of one of the archetypal patterns or motifs, but rather to choose the best ones to use as examples.  Quite honestly, these lightbringer metaphors are in almost every chapter.  You’ll start finding them on your own as you do re-reads, now that you have these symbols and motifs in your mind, I promise you.  There’s a lot of text to pour over, and I haven’t found them all by any stretch.  People frequently message me with astronomy metaphors they have discovered, and you’ll hear me mention them for hat-tips from time to time.  Like I said, it’s a kind of treasure-hunt, and that’s only to find them, and to say nothing of deciphering their specific meaning.  All I can do is to keep podcasting, take my best shot, and wait for the Winds of Winter to come out.

As for this podcast itself, I’m going to begin to branch out with both subject and format.  I’m going to continue to do the big Bloodstone Compendium episodes, continuing the series that I have been doing so far, but I’m also going to do some smaller, more contained episodes which focus on one specific scene or chapter, kind of like I did at the end of the first podcast with Dany’s alchemical wedding scene.  Some of the ones I have in mind for this are Dany’s various visionary sequences, like the Stallion Who Mounts the World prophecy chapter, the series of visions in her Wake the Dragon dream, and the House of the undying chapter.  Other great scenes and chapters I want to dissect are Arya’s chapters under the Red Keep with the dragon skulls, Asha Greyjoy’s Wayward Bride chapter where they fight the mountain clans in the woods, Davos smuggling Edric Storm off of Dragonstone, Jon Snow’s trip to the weirwood grove of nine when they found the starving wildlings, Jamie’s trip to Raventree Hall, and both Oldtown chapters in A Feast for Crows… and many more.  One of the first ones I’ll be doing will the Mountain vs Red Viper trial by combat which I referred to in this podcast.  It was originally a part of this one but had to be cut because of length.  It will be a bit of a follow of a lot of the bloodstone ideas, so look out for that soon.

I’m going to also start to do character based episodes, where we will break down all the symbolism of a specific character and try to figure out what it means of that person.  As I mentioned a little earlier, I’m also going to be getting into the very important topics of greenseers and the Others, and I believe that I going to be able to tear away the veil of secrecy around the Green Men and the Isle of Faces.  I’m really looking forward to that one in particular, because I believe we are going to see the Isle of Faces in the next book and get some answers, so I’ll be sure to get that one as soon as possible.

I’m also very excited to officially announce that I’ll be doing a joint episode with Aziz and Ashaya from the History of Westeros podcast.  That will appear as a podcast in your mythical astronomy feed just like normal, but you’ll also be able to see it in video form on the History of Westeros youtube channel.  The topic is an important one – the Great Empire of the Dawn and the Dawn Age dragonlords.  I’ve referred to my Fingerprints of the Dawn essay a few times, and this joint podcast will be the official podcast version of this information.  It compliments all the Bloodstone Emperor Azor Ahai stuff we’ve been covering, because it traces out the hard evidence of contact between the far east and Westeros in the Dawn Age.  In addition to the Great Empire of the Dawn and Asshai material, we’re basically going to cover all the evidence of people other than First Men in Dawn Age Westeros – strange folktales, anachronistic buildings, evidence of dragons, etc, so it should be a lot of fun.  The History of Westeros folks will have some interesting things to say, to be sure, and we’ll have plenty of free-form discussion, which will be a nice change up from my regular format.

I also did a guest appearance on History of Westeros’s House Dayne Part 2 podcast which was a lot of fun – thanks for having me guys! – and you can find that by looking up History of Westeros on youtube.

Thanks to everyone who voted for my ideas about the Long Night and the Great Empire of the Dawn in the recent ASOIAF fandom poll conducted by Brynden BFish of Wars and Politics of Ice and Fire.  It’s really tremendous to see the moon-destruction theory getting around a bit.  One of the main reasons I’m doing this besides the pure enjoyment of it is to get the word out about what George is doing with his mythology so everyone can enjoy it as much as we are.  So thanks again, thanks to everyone who has listened and shared my page and podcast.  I really appreciate it.  So long for now everyone.

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Please, feel welcome to leave a comment!  Don’t be shy!  You don’t need to be a wordpress member to comment, so have at it. I’d love to hear from you.

• LmL

We can square these two stories as really being the same story if we draw the following correlations:

Lightbringer, the bloody & flaming sword = a “fiery” red comet

Nissa Nissa, the blood sacrifice = the second moon

Azor Ahai, the warrior of fire = the sun

The sun and moon are husband and wife, just as Azor Ahai and Nissa Nissa were, while comets can be perceived as dragons or flaming swords. Therefore, the celestial version of Azor Ahai stabbing his wife with a sword would be the sun striking his lunar wife with a fiery comet. Because I believe that the Qarthine legend describes a moon in eclipse formation – it is said to have “wandered too close to the sun” – the comet would have appeared to have been sticking out like a sword from the sun-moon conjunction, a fiery sword wielded by the solar king against his moon queen.

It would also look a bit like a sperm fertilizing an egg, and that is indeed another connotation of this combined myth: besides being perceived as the sun’s sword, the comet can also be seen as his fiery seed… dragon seed, to be specific.  The moon is an egg and the wife of the sun, after all, and she gives birth to dragons after being impregnated by the Lightbringer comet.

The Qarthine tale tells us what happened to the moon after it cracked open: dragons burst forth and drank the fire of the sun.  Of course in the language of myth-speak, describing falling meteors as dragons is only about a several-thousand year old idea, and its a good one.  Dragons fly and breathe flame, and falling meteorites fly through the air and breathe flame.  Any kind of moon-cracking or moon-exploding would certainly result in meteors falling into the planet’s atmosphere, so it’s a pretty short intuitive leap to understand that what poured forth from the dying moon was actually a storm of fiery meteors, or if you prefer, a storm of flaming swords.  And yes, I do think this is a second meaning of the title “A Storm of Swords.”  The moon is described as an egg from which the dragons were born, so consider the moon to be a mother who died in childbirth.  Compare this to the Lightbringer legend, which has a flaming sword as the product of the moon-maiden’s sacrifice, and we see that the stories match.  A moon maiden dies, and either fiery dragon meteors or flaming swords are born.

We supported the above conclusions by comparing this unified myth to the scene in which Daenerys walks in the funeral pyre of Khal Drogo and wakes her dragon children from stone eggs, a scene which I like to refer to as the “Alchemical Wedding of Daenerys Targaryen.”  Dany is the “moon of Khal Drogo’s life,” and he her “sun and stars,” so the relationship here is clear.  She receives her dragon’s eggs on the day of her wedding (and copulation) with Khal Drogo, recreating the sun’s insemination of the moon with dragon seed, and when moon-maiden Daenerys ‘wanders too close to the sun’s fire’ by walking into Drogo’s pyre, the eggs crack open just as the second moon did, thereby making Dany the mother of dragons, just as the moon was.  The Lightbringer comet which cracked the moon is symbolized by Khal Drogo’s flaming lash which appears to crack open the first egg and of course by the appearance of the red comet itself, while Dany’s dragon children represent the dragon meteors which poured forth from the moon.

I’d like to hone in on the family portrait being painted here.  The sun and moon both die in the process of creating a child, but that child is both of his parents “reborn,” just as every child is a version of their father and mother writ small, a mixture of the two.  The sun and moon are both reborn in their child, in other words.  If the scribes of ancient Asshai weren’t quite so patriarchal in mindset, they might have written that it will be Nissa Nissa reborn who will wake dragons from stone… but as long as we know that they are the same thing, that “Azor Ahai reborn” IS “Nissa Nissa reborn,” we’ll have to let it slide for now.

The next detail that needs recapping is the notion of the comet having split in half as it rounded the sun, before impacting with the second moon.  The best metaphorical example of this in the text was when Tywin split Ned’s sword Ice in half to make two red and black swords.  Tywin is the sun symbol here – he’s the head lion of Lannister.  The Lightbringer comet, meanwhile, is symbolized by Ned’s sword – it was forged in dragonfire and covered in Ned’s blood, just as Lightbringer was made with fire and blood, and of course Arya perceived the red comet as Ice, running red with her father’s blood.  This is an important detail, because if the comet does not split, it would have been destroyed in the moon explosion and there would be no comet to return to the story like a red banner of vengeance. Instead, it appears that only one half of the split comet impacted with the moon, while the second half streaked by along a slightly different trajectory.  The comet that missed would seem to emerge from the other side of the moon explosion intact, like a flaming sword emerging from the heart of a dying moon maiden.  The surviving comet seems to have been transformed to a red color by this explosion, and this would be the same red comet that we see in the main story, notably at the moment when Dany burns Khal Drogo and wakes the dragons.

What I am trying to say is that two kinds of flaming sword / dragon meteors emerged from the moon explosion: one big burning and bleeding red comet, and a thousand thousand meteors burning red as they fell to earth, like smaller versions of the red comet.  Both are the offspring of the sun and moon, and so both represent Lightbringer.  If we want to be more specific, we might say that the surviving comet half is Azor Ahai reborn, while the dragon meteors are the dragons which are woken from stone.   Just as the comet is seen as an extension of the sun which carries the sun’s fire, Azor Ahai’s dragons and his flaming sword are really just an extension of himself.   In essence, Azor Ahai reborn and Lightbringer are the same thing, two parts of a greater whole.

Consider the Dothraki beliefs about what is actually happening when Dany burns Khal Drogo.  The Dothraki see the stars as the spirits of the dead, and so when the Khal burns, his spirit supposedly “rises on his fiery steed to take his place among the stars,” being reborn as a Khal in the Nightlands who leads the starry khalasar.  Drogo’s star is the red comet, and Drogo is playing the role of solar king Azor Ahai in this little metaphorical drama.  In other words, what this scene is telling us that when solar king Azor Ahai dies, he is indeed reborn as the red comet.  Azor Ahai reborn is the one who wakes dragons from stone, just as the red comet was the thing which woke dragon meteors from the stone egg of the second moon.  It’s also interesting to think of Azor Ahai reborn as “King of the Nightlands.”

In the alchemical wedding scene, Daenerys actually plays two roles: that of moon mother, bride of fire and dragons; and that of Azor Ahai reborn, daughter of fire and dragons.  First she plays the moon mother role, becoming the bride of fire as she burns in the sun’s fire and symbolically dies.  She is then reborn in the fire, and wakes dragons from stone – clearly, she is now playing the role of Azor Ahai reborn, who is reborn to wake dragons from stone.  As I mentioned last time, this makes Dany the child of herself, after a fashion.  What’s going on here?  Why is she playing two roles?  Well, because the child of sun and moon can also be perceived as the rebirth of the sun and moon, this process can be depicted as either the birth of a new child entirely, carrying the essence of their parents, or as a literal resurrection of one of the parents.  Jon Snow is one manifestation of Azor Ahai reborn, and his parents die at the time of his birth.  Dany’s original parents die around the time of her birth too – these are depictions of Azor Ahai reborn as a new child carrying on the legacy of their dead parents.  But in this alchemical wedding scene, Dany shows us the resurrection side of things: she begins as the mother of dragons, dying in fiery childbirth, but then also plays the role of the new child, Azor Ahai reborn, who is reborn in fire to wake dragons from stone.

I believe Dany correlates to the surviving half of the comet, “Azor Ahai reborn,” while her dragons symbolize the dragon meteors.  I mentioned that reborn Azor Ahai’s flaming sword and his dragons woken from stone are essentially an extension of himself (or herself), and indeed, Dany’s dragons are very much an extension of herself.  As Dany thinks to herself about Drogon in A Dance with Dragons, “He is fire made flesh, and so am I.”  They can be seen as individual things, but in the end they are smaller parts of a greater whole, sharing the same nature.

In other words, to the extent that Dany is a manifestation of Azor Ahai reborn, the dragons are her Lightbringer, as many have suggested.  However, there are other manifestations of this entire pattern involving other characters, which means that Daenerys is not the only incarnation of reborn Azor Ahai, and her dragons are likely not the only manifestation of Lightbringer.  Jon Snow fans needn’t fear – we’re going to talk a bit about Jon in just a second.

And just to keep the gender equality flowing, I’ll mention that if the Nissa Nissa moon is the mother of dragons, then solar king Azor Ahai is the father of dragons.  The moon maiden is the bride of fire, and the solar king the warrior of fire.  Their child is Azor Ahai reborn, who is the “son of fire” according to Melisandre, completing the family portrait.  Notice that as Dany steps into the firestorm to be reborn, she names herself “daughter of dragons” as well as bride and mother of dragons.  Just as Azor Ahai reborn is the “son of fire,” Dany is reborn in the fire – a child of fire in her own right.  This moment is when she transitions from the bride of fire and dragons to the mother of fire and dragons and finally to the daughter of fire and dragons, a manifestation of Azor Ahai reborn.

Speaking of Azor Ahai as the father of dragons, the name Azor Ahai is actually not just a couple of made up words – it can be pretty well translated in the language of Vedic Sanskrit, the language and culture which gave us the legend of Mithras.  It seems logical to look for a translation of Azor Ahai in Sanskrit, because George based a lot of his Azor Ahai and Lightbringer ideas on Mithras.  So, what does his name mean?  Well, it’s “fire dragon.”  Azor Ahai, father of dragons, is a fire dragon – let it be known.  That’s no surprise – he’s supposed to wake dragons from stone, after all.  It may be that Azor Ahai was in fact a dragonlord… this is an idea we’ll come back to.  (Hat-tip to Westeros.org forum user J Stargaryen)

As for Mithras’s influence on the Lightbringer myth, the full rundown is to be found in Schmendrick’s essay which I mentioned last time, R + L = Lightbringer, but I’ll give you an important part of it here.  Mithras is often depicted as being “rock-born,” a young man emerging from a stone-like egg.  He holds a sword in one hand a torch in the other.  The sword represents death, and the torch rebirth – and Mithras himself aids the righteous in being reborn after death.  Mithras is known as the mediator – and in this instance, he has the power to mediate between death and life.  George calls out to this idea with an obscure God that Arya witnesses in Bravos while getting the tour of the city’s temples in A Dance with Dragons:

Three-headed Trios has that tower with three turrets. The first head devours the dying, and the reborn emerge from the third. I don’t know what the middle head’s supposed to do. 

The middle head represents the underworld, the Bardo realm, the in-between place – it’s the place where the dying go and the reborn emerge from.  And it’s a clear reference to Mithras and this famous depiction of him as rock-born Mithras, with his sword and his torch.

So if a sword represents death, and a torch life, what do we make of a sword which is also a torch?  Consider the Nightswatch vows, in which they declare themselves to be a  sword in the darkness and the light that brings the dawn.  Like the Lightbringer of legend, they are both sword and torch.  This gets to the very heart of what this essay is about – what is the nature of Lightbringer, and of Azor Ahai reborn?

That’s actually our last item to recap – what have we seen so far about the nature of Lightbringer and Azor Ahai?  We examined several things in the last essay which represent Lightbringer, the offspring of sun and moon, and all of them are associated with blood, flame, shadow, and death.  There was the black dragon egg, the black dragon in Dany’s dream, Drogon himself, burning dream Rhaego and actual dead lizard baby Rhaego, Ned’s black dragon-forged sword called Ice, Aegon the Conqueror’s black dragon sword called Blackfyre, and of course the burning dragon meteors of the ancient past and the red comet of the current story.   There are many more Lightbringer symbols to come, and I can promise you that they fit this pattern as well.  We’ll be seeing several of them in this essay.

Consider this one simple idea: in the Azor Ahai story, the moon cracks when Azor Ahai stabs his wife.  In other words, Azor Ahai destroyed the moon by forging Lightbringer.  It’s right there, without any other corroborations or comparisons to other myths  – Azor Ahai broke the moon.  Doesn’t breaking the moon kind of make you a villain?  Much like stabbing your wife, it seems like a messed up thing to do.

When we look to the astronomy represented by the Azor Ahai story, we arrive at the same conclusion: the celestial forging of Lightbringer in the heart of the moon was the cause of the Long Night, not the cure.  If the moon explosion caused the Long Night, that means that Azor Ahai caused the Long Night, because Azor Ahai cracked the moon.  The evidence is mounting: the story of Azor Ahai the noble hero who saved the world might have a few holes in it.  Many of you will have suspected this already – perhaps the first time you heard the part of the story where he stabs his wife in the heart with a freaking sword.  You might have also picked up on the fact that the most prominent advocate for the the concept of “Azor Ahai” reborn is fond of burning people alive, including children, and has a habit of birthing assassin-demons made of pure darkness, which the fandom has somewhat affectionately dubbed “shadow babies.”  Melisandre says the shadows are the servants of the light… but I’m giving that claim a rating of “highly dubious.”  Consider this: when you stand outside and cast a shadow on the ground, is the sun casting the shadow, or are you?  The sun creates light, but the shadow appears only when an object blocks the sun. It is the object blocking the sun that creates the shadow, not the sun.  Mel says we cannot have shadow without light, but that’s not so either.  Without light, all is shadow.  Shadow IS darkness, the opposite of light.  Not the servant of light.  Azor Ahai and Lightbringer brought the darkness.

Consider Dany’s inner musings in A Dance with Dragons on the nature of dragons:

Mother of dragons, Daenerys thought. Mother of monsters.  What have I unleashed upon the world?  A queen I am, but my throne is made of burned bones, and it rests on quicksand. Without dragons, how could she hope to hold Meereen, much less win back Westeros? I am the blood of the dragon, she thought. If they are monsters, so am I.   

Elsewhere in A Dance with Dragons, Xaro Xoan Daxos makes a similar observation to Daenerys, with bonus points for comparing the dragons to a flaming sword flying in the air like a comet:

“When your dragons were small, they were a wonder.  Grown, they are death and devastation, a flaming sword above the world.” 

What this comes down to is a fundamental question about how things work in A Song of Ice and Fire: can human sacrifice and blood magic somehow be used to create a tool which brings life and works to the common good of man?  We all understand Martin’s fondness for shoving grey characters with conflicted hearts into difficult moral dilemmas, but I do not believe that means there is no right and wrong in the story.  Is blood magic an abomination, as the Dothraki say, or is it a machiavellian tool in the hands of the anti-hero who sorta kinda saves the world in bittersweet fashion?

For the record, I lean towards #teamabomination – I’m not only a client, I’m also the founder – but I realize that that could be a projection of my own morality onto the story, and so I’m doing my best to keep an open mind.  Perhaps its like one of those Darth Vader things where a life-long instrument of evil finds redemption at the end… Whatever the case, I believe that we don’t have to simply guess or take sides – I think we have a fair amount of evidence to review which might help us discern the truth.

We’ll begin our  quest to discover who the Azor Ahai really is, and what it means to be Azor Ahai reborn, with a look at what we’ve been told about the warrior of fire and the red sword of heroes.  We’ll be taking a short break from the murk and mire of metaphorical myth to consider the more straightforward and logistical evidence concerning Azor Ahai, such as it is, and then we’ll dive back into the depths of that slimy swamp of symbolism which I like to call “the good stuff.”

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FIVE HERO DEATH PUNCH 

One of the new pieces of information we received about Azor Ahai in the World of Ice and Fire is that the legend of a warrior with a flaming sword exists in several places, but with different names: Hyrkoon the Hero, Yin Tar, Neferion, Eldric Shadowchaser, and of course Azor Ahai.  These are all interesting for various reasons.  Let’s start with talking about where these different names might have originated from.

Azor Ahai: We have always been told that the Azor Ahai myth comes from Asshai and the red priests.  This is very important, so I will include several quotes:

Melisandre was robed all in scarlet satin and blood velvet, her eyes as red as the great ruby that glistened at her throat as if it too were afire.  “In ancient books of Asshai it is written that there will come a day after a long summer when the stars bleed and the cold breath of darkness falls heavy on the world.  In this dread hour a warrior shall draw from the fire a burning sword. And that sword shall be Lightbringer, the Red Sword of Heroes, and he who clasps it shall be Azor Ahai come again, and the darkness shall flee before him.”  She lifted her voice, so it carried out over the gathered host.  “Azor Ahai, beloved of R’hllor! The Warrior of Light, the Son of Fire!  Come forth, your sword awaits you!  Come forth and take it into your hand!”  (ACOK, Davos)

According to Melisandre of Asshai, the legend of Azor Ahai and Lightbringer comes from old books in Asshai.  It’s interesting to note that the prophecy of his return is also from these same books in Asshai, and that prophecy is clearly a central part of R’hllorism.  This is a direct link between the R’hllorists and Asshai.  It’s probably not a coincidence Melsiandre is both a shadowbinder from Asshai and a red priest: they have some areas of mutual interest, to say the least.

“Lord Snow, I left a book for you in my chambers. The Jade Compendium, it was written by the Volantene adventurer Colloquo Votar, who travelled to the east and visited all the lands of the Jade Sea. There is a passage you may find of interest. I’ve told Clydas to mark it for you…. Knowledge is a weapon, Jon.  Arm yourself well before you ride forth to battle.”  (ADWD, Jon)

“The Jade Compendium. The pages that told of Azor Ahai.  Lightbringer was his sword.  Tempered with his wife’s blood if Votar can be believed.  Thereafter Lightbringer was never cold to the touch, but warm as Nissa Nissa had been warm. In battle the blade burned fiery hot.  Once Azor Ahai fought a monster.  When he thrust the sword through the belly of the beast, its blood began to boil.  Smoke and steam poured from its mouth, its eyes melted and dribbled down its cheeks, and its body burst into flame.”  (ADWD, Jon)

Colloquo Votar, who wrote the Jade Compendium, travelled to the lands of the Jade Sea – most likely to Asshai itself, where almost certainly obtained this knowledge of Azor Ahai and Lightbringer.  We can see that Aemon Targaryen considers it to be of critical importance, as his parting advice to Jon Snow was to read an understand it.  We can deduce that Rhaegar was also well familiar with the Jade Compendium, as we know he and Aemon discussed the Azor Ahai prophecy together.  This is also a clue that Aemon, at least, thinks that the Azor Ahai information is relevant to the Nights Watch, the people fighting the Others, strengthening the idea that there is a connection between Azor Ahai and the Last Hero.

It is also written that there are annals in Asshai of such a darkness, and of a hero who fought against it with a red sword.  His deeds are said to have been performed before the rise of Valyria, in the earliest ages when Old Ghis was first forming its empire.  This legend has spread west from Asshai, and the followers of R’hllor claim that this hero was named Azor Ahai, and prophesy his return.  (TWOIAF)

Again we see the connection between R’hllorism and Asshai, and that the legend of Azor Ahai and Lightbringer does in fact come from Asshai.  It seems likely Azor Ahai himself came from Asshai, I would suggest. I mean, if not from Asshai, then where?

Hyrkoon the Hero can only come from the formerly existent Patrimony of Hyrkoon, to the east of the Bones Mountains. Hyrkoon’s former empire is now the Great Sand Sea, with the only remnants being the three fortress cities of Bayasabhad, Samyriana, and Kayakayanaya in the Bones mountains, all of which are populated by fierce warrior women who don’t take BS from anyone.

Neferion similarly must come from the “secret city” of Nefer, the sole remaing city of the N’ghai, also east of the Bones mountains.  Nefer is the lone port on the coast of the Shivering Sea east of the Bones.

Yin Tar seems to be an obviously Yi Tish name.  Their “first and most glorious” capital city is “Yin.”  The Golden Empire of Yi Ti is east of the Bones mountains on the coast of the Jade Sea.

Eldric Shadowchaser is the hard one – “Eldric” sounds like a Westerosi name – House Stark has had two “Edrics Starks” (shoutout to Edric Snowbeard) and one “Elric Stark” that we know of.  There is no similar-sounding name or word to be found anywhere in Essos.  All of the other ‘red sword legends’ are from far eastern Essos, and the Worldbook mentions these five names while telling the story of the Great Empire of the Dawn, a lost civilization of the Dawn Age whose domain was basically all of the habitable land east of the Bones mountains.  Thus it would seem odd for Eldric Shadowchaser to be from Westeros.  If however, the Last Hero and his dragon steel sword do indeed have a connection to Azor Ahai and his Lightbringer sword as many have proposed, that would mean that Azor Ahai (or perhaps his son?) came to Westeros with his fiery red sword. Perhaps “Eldric Shadowchaser” has something to do with this – it could be the name he was known by in Westeros.

Now, keeping mind that the question is whether or not Azor Ahai was really a heroic savior figure, let’s take a brief look at these places which tell a story of a warrior with a flaming sword.  We don’t know where Eldric Shadowchaser is from, and Yi Ti seems to have its share of refined culture and depravity both over the course of its long existence – not especially better or worse than anywhere else.  But these other three… well…

Before the Dry Times and the coming of the Great Sand Sea, the Jogos Nhai fought many a bloody border war against the Patrimony of Hyrkoon as well, poisoning rivers and wells, burning towns and cities, and a carrying off thousands into slavery on the plains, whilst the Hyrkoon for their part were sacrificing tens of thousands of the zorse-riders to their dark and hungry gods.  (TWOIAF)

Okay, bloody border war, that’s nothing especially heinous… OH HEY THERE, sacrificing thousands of humans to your dark and hungry gods, that’s the kind of thing we are on the lookout for.  How many people did Hyrkoon the Hero sacrifice to the dark gods, I wonder?

Nefer, chief city of the kingdom of N’ghai, hemmed in by towering chalk cliffs and perpetually shrouded in fog.  When seen from the harbor, Nefer appears to be no more than a small town, but it is said that nine-tenths of the city is beneath the ground.  For that reason travelers call Nefer the Secret City.  By any name, the city enjoys a sinister reputation as a hunt of necromancers and torturers.  (TWOIAF)

I know necromancy and torture are just par for the course at this point, but let’s stop to consider: torturing people and reanimating corpses.  That’s what this city is known for, plus the fog.  Basically, it’s like a partially-undergound version of Seattle, with grunge bands and the space needle swapped out for necromancy and torture.  Kidding aside, the necromancy in particular seems relevant.

And now let’s see what The World of Ice and Fire has to say about Asshai:

Few places in the known world are as remote as Asshai, and fewer are as forbidding.  Travelers tell us that the city is built entirely of black stone: halls, hovels, temples, palaces, streets, walls, bazaars, all.  Some say as well that the stone of Asshai has a greasy, unpleasant feel to it, that it seems to drink the light, dimming tapers and torches and hearth fires alike.  The nights are very black in Asshai, all agree, and even the brightest days of summer are somehow gray and gloomy.

The dark city by the shadow is a city steeped in sorcery.  Warlocks, wizards, alchemists, moonsingers, red priests, black alchemists, necromancers, aeromancers, pyromancers, blood mages, torturers, inquisitors, poisoners, godswives, night-walkers, shapechangers, worshippers of the Black Goat and the Pale Child and the Lion of Night, all find welcome in Asshai-by-the-Shadow, where nothing is forbidden.  Here they are free to practice their spells without restraint or censure, conduct their obscene rights, and fornicate with demons (!) if that is their desire.

Most sinister of all the sorcerers of Asshai are the shadowbinders, whose lacquered masks hide their faces from the eyes of gods and men. They alone dare to go up river past the walls of Asshai, into the heart of darkness.  (TWOIAF)

It gets much worse from there, going up the river Ash, where demons and dragons making their lairs, a corpse city lies at the Shadow’s heart, etc.  Septon Barth also tells us that there are no children or animals in Asshai-by-the-Shadow, and that the malign influence of polluted waters of the River Ash may be to blame.  That river is said to be black during the day and to glimmer with phosphorescence at night, and the fish that swim it are blind and deformed.

Asshai is basically a magical version of a nuclear wasteland inhabited by the absolute worst and most depraved sorts of black magicians.  It’s called “Asshai-by-the-Shadow,” and this is where the legend of Azor Ahai comes from.  These are the folks naming him a “hero.”

As for the people who prophesy his return as a savior figure, the R’hllorists?  With their shadow babies and burning of the unbelievers and sacrificing children to wake magical stone fire-monsters they hope to control?  With their longing for a summer without end, which would be just as bad a winter without end?  Are anyone’s red flags going off yet?  Is it really so crazy to think that maybe the hero of places like Hyrkoon, Nefer, and Asshai-by-the-Shadow is actually, how shall we say, “The Prince of Darkness?”  (cue evil laughter)  We also may want to keep an open mind as we look at the other supposed “heroes” and “villains” of the ancient legends.  This may potentially be good news for the Nights King fanclub (quick shoutout – hey guys!)

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Smithing and Stealing

We continue our exploration of the idea that Azor Ahai was not the darkness-slaying hero he is remembered as, but rather the ‘bad guy’ who murdered his wife and was associated with the cause of the Long Night by looking at another legend about a bad guy who murdered a woman and caused the Long Night.  This excerpt is from The World of Ice and Fire and concerns the Yi Tish legend of a lost civilization called the Great Empire of the Dawn and its downfall, a tale of usurpation and murder remembered as the Blood Betrayal.

In the beginning, the priestly scribes of Yin declare, all the land between the Bones and the freezing desert called the Grey Waste, from the Shivering Sea to the Jade Sea (including even the great and holy isle of Leng), formed a single realm ruled by the God-on-Earth, the only begotten son of the Lion of Night and Maiden-Made of Light, who traveled about his domains in a palanquin carved from a single pearl and carried by a hundred queens, his wives.   For ten thousand years the Great Empire of the Dawn flourished in peace and plenty under the God-on-Earth, until at last he ascended to the stars to join his forbearers.

Dominion over mankind then passed to his eldest son, who was known as the pearl Emperor and ruled for 1000 years. The Jade Emperor, the Tourmaline Emperor, the Onyx Emperor, the Topaz Emperor, and the Opal Emperor followed in turn, each reigning for centuries… Yet every reign was shorter and more troubled than the one preceding it, for wild men and baleful beasts pressed at the borders of the Great Empire, lesser kings grew prideful and rebellious, and the common people gave themselves over to avarice, envy, lust, murder, incest, gluttony, and sloth. 

When the daughter of the Opal Emperor succeeded him as the Amethyst Empress, her envious younger brother cast her down and slew her, proclaiming himself the Bloodstone Emperor and beginning a reign of terror.  He practiced dark arts, torture, and necromancy, enslaved his people, took a tiger woman for his bride, feasted on human flesh, and cast down the true Gods to worship a black stone that had fallen from the sky.  (Many scholars count the Bloodstone Emperor as the first High Priest of the sinister Church of Starry Wisdom, which persists to this day in many port cities throughout the known world). 

In the annals of the further east, it was the Blood Betrayal, as his usurpation is named, that ushered in the age of darkness called the Long Night.  Despairing of the evil that had been unleashed on earth, the Maiden-Made-of-Light turned her back upon the world, and the Lion of Night came forth in all his wroth to punish the wickedness of men.  

How long the darkness endured no man can say, but all agree it was only when a great warrior – known variously as Hyrkoon the Hero, Azor Ahai, Yin Tar, Neferion, and Eldric Shadowchaser – arose to give courage to the race of men and lead the virtuous into battle with his blazing sword Lightbringer that the darkness was put to rout, and light and love returned once more to the world.

Yet the Great Empire of the Dawn was not reborn, for the restored world was a broken place where every tribe of men went its own way, fearful of all the others, and war and lust and murder endured, even to our present day. Or so of the men and women of the further east believe.  (TWOIAF)

Here we have a story of a powerful sorcerer king who caused the sun to hide its face and the Long Night to fall by killing his wife and practicing dark magic.  Since we suspect that Azor Ahai caused the Long Night by cracking the moon when he stabbed his wife in a blood magic ritual, we must consider the possibility that these two myths might be speaking of the same events.  They seem to have the same skeleton, and both are from the far east.  Both stories are tied to the Long Night.  Both involve blood magic or dark magic.  Azor Ahai killed his wife, Nissa Nissa, and the Bloodstone Emperor killed his sister, the Amethyst Empress.

As a final comparison between the myths, notice that Azor Ahai cracked the moon, which poured forth dragon meteors, while the Bloodstone Emperor worshipped a black meteor.  Could this black stone that fell from the sky that the Bloodstone Emperor worshipped have been one of these “dragon meteors” which fell to earth after the second moon exploded?   If I’m right about the second moon-cracking being the cause of the Long Night, we should see myths about meteor strikes during the Long Night… and here we have that very thing.  If Azor Ahai, remembered as the hero, was really the villain who caused the Long Night, then somewhere, we should find a legend about some kind of dark sorcerer who caused the Long Night, the true story of Azor Ahai … and here we find that very thing.  Is it possible that these stories are mixed up somehow, and that this Bloodstone Emperor who corrupted and destroyed the great Dawn Age empire in the far east was actually Azor Ahai?

That’s exactly what I mean to suggest – all hail the Bloodstone Emperor Azor Ahai, First of his Name, God-Emperor of the Great Empire of the Evening and High Priest of the Church of Starry Wisdom and King of the Nightlands, practitioner of dark arts, torture, and necromancy; enslaver of his own people and eater of human flesh; he who slew the Amethyst Empress Nissa Nissa, cast down the true gods, and worshipped the black stone which fell from the sky.  Now that’s the kind of fellow who you would expect to reign supreme during the Long Night.

Since we know that Nissa Nissa represents the moon, celestially, the Amethyst Empress should as well.  This makes sense, for in the legend, the death of the Amethyst Empress resulted in the fall of the Long Night, and of course our main hypothesis is that the death of the second moon was the physical mechanism which brought the fall of the Long Night.  And if Azor Ahai the “fire dragon” was indeed a dragonlord – and whats the point of waking dragons if you aren’t a dragonlord – it’s well possible that the Amethyst Empress Nissa Nissa was both Azor Ahai’s wife and sister, given what we’ve seen of dragonlords and incest.

I think that the Bloodstone Emperor’s “casting down the true gods” is symbolically the same thing as killing the Amethyst Empress, Nissa Nissa, since she represents the moon, and the moon is a god.  “Moon is god, woman wife of sun.  It is known,” as Irri and Jiqui tell Dany immediately after we hear of the second-moon-cracking-to-pour-forth-dragons story.  The excerpt above even uses the “cast down” phrase for both the Amethyst Empress and the “true gods,” which of course makes sense if they are both symbols of the fallen second moon.  In other words, if Azor Ahai wielding a fiery sword is equivalent to a fiery comet coming from the sun, then the killing of the Amethyst Empress Nissa Nissa is equivalent to the murder of a moon goddess, or “casting down the true gods.”  High crimes, indeed.

Casting down the gods, pulling down things from heaven, stealing fire or knowledge from heaven, gods descending from heaven with divine knowledge and dying, only to be resurrected – these are all variations of the same idea, and it’s one of the very oldest in mythology.  The serpent in the Garden of Eden story encouraged Adam to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, so that he might become like gods, while the biblical Lucifer challenged God and was cast down from heaven to become the lord of hell.  Prometheus stole the fire of heaven for mankind, Gilgamesh (and Moses) recorded the wisdom of God on stone tablets, and Jesus descended from heaven to give the gift of spiritual rebirth.  Queztalcoatl brought all the knowledge of the gods to the natives of the Americas, including astronomy, farming, metallurgy, and many other gifts of civilization, and he too died, descended to the underworld, and was resurrected.   Osiris was sacrificed and dismembered, only to be reassembled by Isis and resurrected as the Lord of the Underworld.  Most of these mythological characters and deities are associated with the Morningstar, Venus, and are sometimes called “Morningstar deities.”  In our case, the ‘stealer of heavenly fire’ is the Bloodstone Emperor Azor Ahai, and the stolen fire of heaven that takes the form of a goddess is the Amethyst Empress, Nissa Nissa.  I’ll have an essay dedicated to the various Ironborn legends of the Grey King, but I’ve already mentioned that they involve slaying an island-drowning sea dragon, which I take for a falling meteor, and the very Prometheus-like story of the Grey King stealing the fire of the gods via the Storm God’s thunderbolt.  These stories seem to share a common theme, if not a common origin.

As my friend and nerd-celebrity Brynden BFish of the Wars and Politics of Ice and Fire blog recently wrote on Reddit, the Azor Ahai story is the “monomyth” of A Song of Ice and Fire.  The Bloodstone Emperor Blood Betrayal story seems to be a different version of the Azor Ahai Lightbringer legend, and I have found many other myths and legends which may also be referring to the same events, as I have alluded to.  Consider the concept of pulling down things from heaven which I just mentioned, and let’s see how many ancient folktales concern something falling from heaven, the death of a goddess, people trying to be like gods, etc.  Keep in mind that I believe one of these falling moon meteors landed in the ocean, provoking floods, and so sometimes the moon goddess is depicted as a mermaid or as an aquatic woman of some kind:

Azor Ahai – killed Nissa Nissa in blood magic ritual to obtain flaming sword, cracked the moon

Qarthine Origin of Dragons – the moon cracked, flaming dragons poured forth

Bloodstone Emperor – killed Amethyst Empress, cast down the true gods, worshipped a black stone that fell from the sky, possessed starry wisdom

Grey King – slew sea dragon which drowns islands, stole Storm God’s fire via thunderbolt, took a mermaid to wife, long life

Durran Godsgrief – stole daughter of the wind and sea gods, dooming her to eventual death & provoking floods, long life

Hugor Hill – the Father pulled down seven stars from heaven for his crown, married maiden with eyes like blue pools. He is probably the same as the Andal hero Hukko, who slew the seven swan maidens

Lann the Clever – stole the fire of the sun to color his hair, impregnated maidens without their knowledge, long life

Night’s King – married a woman with moon-pale skin, committed horrible magical atrocities & sacrilege

Hammer of the Waters – something “hammered” the land and broke it, sorcery (“Old Gods”) was part of the cause

Ser Galladon of Morne – the Maiden herself “lost her heart” to Galladon and gave him a magic sword, which I believe refers to the second moon and Lightbringer

Dawn – a magic sword made from a pale stone which is the heart of a fallen star

Pretty impressive, when you look at them all together, isn’t it?  Eleven different stories from the Dawn Age or Age of Heroes (I don’t think there’s really a difference), and all of them containing similar key elements.  We’ll be getting into all of these myths sooner or later, but I wanted to lay them out here so you can see the continuity of theme: challenging the gods, stealing from the gods, pulling gods down, gods descending from heaven, and things falling form the sky in general.  Most of these stories also involve cataclysms of some kind, being either tied to the Long Night directly or referring to floods and earthquakes, etc.  Many of these stories also involve legendary figures who had many, many children and founded nations.

There’s also a modern echo of this story in the Doom of Valyria.  One story about the Doom says that the priests of R’hllor “called down the fire of their god,” while another says that red clouds rained down dragonglass and the black blood of demons.  The Valyrians, meanwhile, believed themselves to be like gods and defied nature itself by harnessing the 14 flames and enslaving or even wiping out whole peoples and nations.  Obviously this story doesn’t describe the Long Night, but I believe George is using it as a parallel to give us clues about the Long Night disaster.

While we’re talking about stealing, we can’t pass up one of the occurrences in the series of actual astronomy – observation of the stars – as Jon demonstrates his starry wisdom in A Storm of Swords:

So many stars, he thought as he trudged up the slope through pines and firs and ash. Maester Luwin had taught him his stars as a boy in Winterfell; he had learned the names of the twelve houses of heaven and the rulers of each; he could find the seven wanderers sacred to the Faith; he was old friends with the Ice Dragon, the Shadowcat, the Moonmaid, and the Sword of the Morning. All those he shared with Ygritte, but not some of the others. We look up at the same stars, and see such different things. The King’s Crown was the Cradle, to hear her tell it; the Stallion was the Horned Lord; the red wanderer that septons preached was sacred to their Smith up here was called the Thief. And when the Thief was in the Moonmaid, that was a propitious time for a man to steal a woman, Ygritte insisted. “Like the night you stole me. The Thief was bright that night.”

“I never meant to steal you,” he said. “I never knew you were a girl until my knife was at your throat.”

Now first of all, raise your hands if you can look up at the night sky and locate the twelve constellations of the zodiac and perhaps a few others.  If your hand is up, congratulations – you’re a real renaissance man, or woman.  Jon Snow is actually a halfway decent amateur astronomer, and what’s interesting is that he is one of the only characters to really observe the stars in any detail, and he does it again later on in A Storm of Swords as well.  There are a couple of times where a constellation is made note of in the narrative, Davos has a very cool scene at Dragonstone observing the stars, and a feverish Daenerys has a long conversation with Quaithe’s mask of starlight at the end of A Dance with Dragons, but Jon is one of the only people besides Davos and the maesters that we see really observing the stars.  Observing the stars doesn’t necessarily make you the Bloodstone Emperor reincarnate, but I’m just saying – Jon has a bit of starry wisdom.

The term “wanderer” refers to the concept of stars which do not move with the backdrop of all the other stars – these are the five planets visible from earth with the naked eye, plus the sun and moon to make seven.  In antiquity, these were commonly referred to as the seven celestial “wanderers” or just “wandering stars” in general.  Comets too are called wandering stars, for the same reason – they are “a star with a tail, lost in the heavens” as Maester Cressen puts it in the prologue of A Clash of Kings.

The red wanderer which is associated with both the Smith and the Thief is almost certainly Mars, the red planet.  We could go off on a tangent about mythology associated with Mars, but I just want to stick to the Westerosi mythology here.  The red wanderer in this story makes for a good stand-in for the red comet, a wandering red star.  And look – it’s trying to impregnate the Moonmaid!  That’s pretty on-the-nose.

In turn, the two mythic figures associated with the red wanderer, the “the Smith” and “the Thief,” both seem to be aspects of the Azor Ahai archetype.  Azor Ahai was known for being a smith in a literal sense, because he created the sword Lightbringer – heat, hammer, and fold, oh yes, until the sword was done.  He’s also “the Smith” in a more abstract sense, since he forged the burning sword meteors, and perhaps that nasty Hammer of the Waters, which may have been a moon meteor.  The Bloodstone Emperor is certainly the thief, as we have discussed, stealing the throne of the Amethyst Empress, the fire of the gods, and even the moon goddess herself.  If these are the same person as I suggest, then we can see that the Red Wanderer is actually symbolizing four different aspects of the Bloodstone Emperor Azor Ahai – the bleeding, wandering star; the smithing of a sword, the stealing of the fire of the gods, and the impregnation of the moon maiden.  In other words, it makes sense for the red wander to to be associated with Azor Ahai symbols and Bloodstone Emperor symbols if they are in fact the same person.

Also emphasized is the killing / procreation dual metaphor of Lightbringer in the custom of  “stealing” a woman, which Jon accomplishes with actual violence and near murder.  Another time we’ll break down Jon’s entire trip up the Skirling Pass in to meet his lady love, but for now I’ll just mention that from the bottom of the mountain, Ygritte’s “glimmering” watchfire was described as a “fire in the night” which was ” like a “fallen star” which “burned redder than the other stars.”  That’s a nice tie-in to the discussion of the red wanderer and Jon’s stealing of Ygritte. The same event is referenced twice, in two different books, with a fire like a fallen red star in one scene and the red wanderer which is a thief and a smith in the other.

Jon is playing the role of Azor Ahai, climbing to the fiery star to steal a moon maiden, who is of course Ygritte, with her hair kissed by fire and eyes “as wide as hen’s eggs.”  The moon was an egg that was kissed by the solar fire of Azor Ahai – you get the idea.  Jon thinks about killing her with his dragon-forged sword, but falls in love with her instead.  Maybe there’s hope for young Jon Snow, even though his raven does call him a thief from time to time.

That’s not a joke, actually – Jon, as an important manifestation of Azor Ahai reborn, should be a thief and a smith.  The Thief symbolism is clear – between the raven and Ygritte, it’s unanimous – and the Smith symbolism is there too, though it is more subtle.  When Jon becomes commander, he takes up residence in the armory, the former quarters of one of his mentors, Donal Noye, Castle Black’s valiant but fallen smith.  The sword Jon’s trying to forge is probably the Nightswatch, the sword in the darkness, although right now that’s not going so well.  Regardless, the point is that Jon seems to be wearing both symbols, the smith and the thief, and that these are both part of the Azor Ahai archetype.

Let’s return to the comparison between the stories of the Bloodstone Emperor and Azor Ahai.  We see that the Bloodstone Emperor is defined by the killing of the rightful ruler of his kingdom, his sibling, and the usurpation of the throne.  Azor Ahai is defined by killing his wife, his love, and fighting the darkness with a sword of red fire.  Both of these ideas are combined in one of Jon Snow’s most important scenes of A Dance with Dragons, one which is brimming with Lightbringer symbolism (as well as a non-symbolic, literally-on-fire red sword).  As I mentioned before, Jon is the other high-profile incarnation of Azor Ahai reborn, and so I find it highly significant that he seems to again be manifesting the actions of both Azor Ahai and the Bloodstone Emperor at the same time, since I believe them to be the same person:

That night he dreamt of wildlings howling from the woods, advancing to the moan of warhorns and the roll of drums.  Boom DOOM boom DOOM boom DOOM came the sound, a thousand hearts with a single beat.  Some had spears and some had bows and some had axes. Others rode on chariots made of bones, drawn by teams of dogs as big as ponies. Giants lumbered amongst them, forty feet tall, with mauls the size of oak trees.

“Stand fast,” Jon Snow called. “Throw them back.” He stood atop the Wall, alone. “Flame,” he cried, “feed them flame,” but there was no one to pay heed.

They are all gone. They have abandoned me.

Burning shafts hissed upward, trailing tongues of fire.  Scarecrow brothers tumbled down, black cloaks ablaze.  “Snow,” an eagle cried, as foemen scuttled up the ice like spiders.  Jon was armored in black ice, but his blade burned red in his fist.  As the dead men reached the top of the Wall he sent them down to die again.  He slew a greybeard and a beardless boy, a giant, a gaunt man with filed teeth, a girl with thick red hair.  Too late he recognized Ygritte.  She was gone as quick as she’d appeared.

The world dissolved into a red mist. Jon stabbed and slashed and cut.  He hacked down Donal Noye and gutted Deaf Dick Follard. Qhorin Halfhand stumbled to his knees, trying in vain to staunch the flow of blood from his neck.  “I am the Lord of Winterfell,” Jon screamed. It was Robb before him now, his hair wet with melting snow.  Longclaw took his head off.  Then a gnarled hand seized Jon roughly by the shoulder.  He whirled… and woke with a raven pecking at his chest. “Snow,” the bird cried.  (ADWD, Jon)

Jon performs the entire range of deeds here: he slays his love with a sword of red fire, just as Azor Ahai did, and he kills his sibling and usurps their throne, just as the Bloodstone Emperor did.  At first he appears to be the Last Hero, abandoned and alone but heroically fighting the wildling invaders, who sound like Others (“howling” like the north winds, “scuttling up the ice like (ice) spiders”).  But we know that the wildlings aren’t really inhuman ice demons, and Jon’s dream of valor quickly warps into a nightmare as he realizes he’s killing innocent people, but cannot stop himself.  The killings of Ygritte and Robb symbolize the forging of Lightbringer and the Blood Betrayal both, the moment Jon becomes the Bloodstone Emperor, Azor Ahai reborn.

After that, the world dissolves into red mist – recall Dany’s blood boiling and turning to mist in her wake the dragon dream – and he commits betrayal after betrayal, murdering his closest friends, culminating in his murder and usurpation of Robb’s throne.  A nightmare indeed… Just what exactly does it mean for someone to show signs of being Azor Ahai reborn?  What kind of sword was this “Lightbringer?”  These are two of the important questions which we will attempt to shed light on, if you’ll pardon the pun, as we unravel the legend of Azor Ahai, Nissa Nissa, and Lightbringer.  At the very least, I believe this scene supports the notion that Azor Ahai and the Bloodstone Emperor are the same person, the same archetype, and that anyone who is “Azor Ahai reborn” will be dealing with the dark legacy of the Bloodstone Emperor in some way.

Consider Jon’s black ice armor and burning red sword.  Azor Ahai reborn is symbolized by the red comet, as we saw with Khal Drogo being reborn in the night lands as the red comet.  Since a comet is really just a dirty ball of ice and rock – and dirt is what makes ice “black” to begin with – Jon is actually a depiction of the red comet in this dream.  Black ice, burning red – that’s our red comet, symbol of Azor Ahai reborn and Lightbringer.  This corroborates what I was suggesting before, that Azor Ahai reborn and Lightbringer are the same thing.  It also would seem to corroborate the idea that Azor Ahai’s sword was a black sword which burned red.  Just as black ice and red fire Jon represents the comet, he also represents Lightbringer the sword – Jon is a sword in the darkness, after all.  A sword of black ice, burning red.

We’ve seen a sword of black ice before, and it’s a sword that symbolizes Lightbringer.  Ned’s Ice is a black sword – a grey so dark it looks black, to be technical – which was forged in dragon fire.  Black – Ice, get it?  Ha ha.  In Jon’s dream, it is Longclaw, another virtually-black Valyrian steel sword, which burns red.  I think all of this suggests that Lightbringer and the dragonsteel of the Last Hero may be related to Valyrian steel, or at least steel made with dragon fire.  Azor Ahai was a fire dragon, and he forged his sword in the “sacred fires” – perhaps those sacred fires were the fires of dragons.

If black ice / red fire Jon symbolizes the red comet, he should also symbolize the moon meteors, since the moon meteors and the red comet are both manifestations of Azor Ahai reborn and Lightbringer, two parts of a greater whole.  Literal black ice is a good match for the comet, a ball of dirty ice, and the idea of black ice as a symbol for Valyrian steel is a good match for the moon meteors, since meteors usually contain iron (as steel swords do) and are symbolized as flaming swords.

There’s a great corroboration of the idea that red fire and black ice are symbols which represent Jon Snow to be found elsewhere in A Dance with Dragons.  The night before Jon is preparing to let the wildlings through the Wall, Jon looks at the cracks of the Wall, which has been weeping, and sees and interesting optical illusion.  The last light of the sun reflects off the meltwater in the cracks and the cracks “go from red to grey to black, from streaks of fire to rivers of black ice.”  What is interesting is that in her House of the Undying visions, Daenerys saw the blue rose in the chink in the Wall, the same place that we see red fire and black ice.  Most people interpret the blue rose in the Wall as a reference to the legacy of Lyanna flowering at the Wall, Jon’s Stark heritage.  I would suggest that the red fire and black ice refers to his dragon heritage, passed down to him from the Valyrians and Azor Ahai himself.  Both are personal symbols for Jon, and so we find them in the same place – at least, that’s my interpretation.

After seeing the red fire and black ice, Jon thinks to himself that the Wall must be manned.  That’s exactly where he was in his dream of being armored in black ice and wielding a burning red sword, and thus we can see that the two scenes are connected.

As for the astronomy of that scene, it’s pretty easy – when the sun shone it’s last light, streaks of red fire (meteors) triggered rivers of black ice – the black tide.  These are the floods of the sea dragon which drowns whole islands and the floods of the sea and wind gods’ wrath sent against Durran Godsgrief after he stole a goddess.  These are the waves of blood and night associated with Ned’s “Black Ice,” and thus Lightbringer.  Jon also muses that by letting the wildlings through the Wall, they are “dancing on rotten ice,” and that one crack means that they will all drown.  Again, we see that the black ice leads to drowning.

Elsewhere in A Dance with Dragons, the wall walks of Winterfell are said to be “treacherous with black ice.”  That’s a link between black ice and Winterfell – and thus between Ned’s sword and the concept of “black ice.”  Black ice is rotten and treacherous, just like the Bloodstone Emperor Azor Ahai and his black sword.

All in all, Jon’s Azor Ahai dream of being armored in black ice and wielding a burning red sword is quite the densely packed bundle of symbolism.  It shows Jon playing the combined role of Azor Ahai and Bloodstone Emperor, and Jon’s black ice and red fire symbols show us the nature of the comet, the meteors, and of Lightbringer the burning black sword.  And unfortunately, all of it seems very dark and bloody.

Like Jon, Daenerys also performs the actions of Azor Ahai, being reborn and waking dragons from stone, and the Bloodstone Emperor, by participating in the killing of her sibling – justified, yes, but she did participate – and in doing so she took his place as exiled monarch of Westeros.  I’m not judging, I’m just saying – that the symbolism matches.  Dany also killed Khal Drogo, her mate, and became what he was: a Khal(eesi).  Again, it was arguably the right thing to do – it was a mercy killing – but the pattern is still there.  Killing your love, and taking their place as ruler.  Killing your sibling, and taking their place as ruler.  The fact that Dany and Jon act out the deeds of both Azor Ahai and the Bloodstone Emperor seem to corroborate the idea that they were the same person.

As we’ve seen, the various symbolic manifestations of Lightbringer are always associated with darkness and shadow, black blood, fire transformation, and death.   Now let’s consider the symbolism around Jon Snow a bit further.   He’s the man with “an evil name” (Ygritte, A Clash of Kings) who always dresses in black (or black ice armor, as above) and is described as “a shadow among shadows”  (A Clash of Kings).  Jon’s hunger for Winterfell is described as being as sharp as a dragonglass knife inside of him – and dragonglass, being frozen fire, may be another aspect of the black ice symbol.  The black brothers of the Nightswatch are also said to have black blood.  This is a euphemism of course, just like a Dodger fan would claim to “bleed Dodger Blue,” but it’s also symbolism.  Symbolism, disguised as euphemism.  If Jon is in fact Rhaegar’s son, then he’s a dragon as well.  He has burnt hands, even – recall the fiery hand of R’hllor in the Benerro scene, the hand that flings the burnt and bloody meteors.  From top to bottom, Jon’s symbolism is consistent with Azor Ahai reborn / Lightbringer archetype.

Is Jon the son of sun and moon, symbolically speaking?  Well yes, absolutely.  Rhaegar the dragon prince plays the role of solar king, with his extensive Apollo symbolism.  He’s even got two wives, or at least one wife and one baby-momma, just as the sun would have have two moons before the Long Night disaster.  Lyanna, with her lunar halo-like crown of blue roses, is the moon maiden who dies giving birth to dragon seed.

He dreamt an old dream, of three knights in white cloaks, and a tower long fallen, and Lyanna in her bed of blood.
…
“No,” Ned said with sadness in his voice. “Now it ends.” As they came together in a rush of steel and shadow, he could hear Lyanna screaming. “Eddard!” she called. A storm of rose petals blew across a blood-streaked sky, as blue as the eyes of death.

Lyanna’s bed of blood recalls the blood of Lightbringer’s tempering and the dual metaphor of battle and birth, as well as the somewhat murky concept of ‘moon blood’ which I will clarify in due time.  The bed of moon blood was the death of the moon and the birthing of Lighrbringer, just Lyanna’s bed of blood signifies the birthing bed and the deathbed both.  Her apparent death in the Tower of Joy places her up in the celestial realm, and Eddard sees her deathly blue rose petals and what is probably meant to be her blood streaked across the sky in his dream recall of the scene.  Her rose petals are actually called a storm, in fact, and that’s exactly the idea.  The birth of Azor Ahai reborn and Lightbringer and the death of the moon are accompanied by a great bloody storm.  If you’re thinking of Daenerys Stormborn and the horrendous gale that raged on Dragonstone at her birth, you’ve got exactly the right idea and you’re a total smarty-pants.

As an aside, I should mention that the ‘maiden in the tower’ is a well known mythological archetype (in Arthurian myth especially, shout-out to Lady Gywnhyfvar of Radio Westeros), and George has adapted it here to his moon maiden archetype.  All throughout the books, we’ll see the top of the tower used to represent the celestial realm, and the tops of mountains and castles as well.  Here’s a great quote from A Dance with Dragons which makes this point nicely:

Dany broke her fast under the persimmon tree that grew in the terrace garden, watching her dragons chase each other about the apex of the Great Pyramid where the huge bronze harpy once stood.
. . .
Up here in her garden Dany sometimes felt like a god, living atop the highest mountain in the world.

The pinnacle of a mountain or pyramid is also viewed as a place to communicate with the heavenly realms in many real world cultures and belief systems.  The Egyptians, for example, viewed the pyramids as the place where the Pharaoh ascends to heaven and becomes like Osiris.  The top of the pyramid is called the ben-ben stone, and the original ben-ben was supposedly a stone that fell from heaven.  George is really just carrying forward this real-world mythological association into his own mythos.  This quote gets bonus points for placing dragons at the apex of the pyramid with moon goddess Daenerys; dragons came from the moon, way up in the sky, and that’s what the tops of these places symbolize – the celestial realm.

Consider Ashara Dayne, the lady of “Star-fall,” who falls into the sea from atop a tower called the Palestone Sword, and was said to have died of a broken heart.  I don’t know what’s up with Ashara Dayne – if she’s still alive, or if she had a surviving child – but I do know she is part of the moon maiden archetype, leaping from a tower into the sea to her death just as the second moon fell from the sky like a falling star and in some cases, landing into the sea.  Her broken heart calls to mind Nissa Nissa’s heart, pierced by Lightbringer, an idea which I believe is echoed in the Ser Galldon tale, where the Maiden loses her heart to Galladon and gives him a magic sword.

The Tower of Joy is a tower “long fallen,” symbolizing the fall of a heavenly body, and there are a few other towers that we will run across that are being used the same way, such as Queenscrown, the Children’s Tower at Moat Cailin, towers at Harrenhall, the Eyrie, and the Hammerhorn Keep, and Sea Tower of castle Pyke on the Iron Islands.  At Dany’s alchemical wedding scene, the role of the tower was played by the tall wooden platform which became Drogo’s pyre.  The platform shifts and collapses around Daenerys and unleashes a “firestorm” amidst the thunderous cracks of the dragon’s eggs.

Lyanna’s apparent death in her bed of blood  at the top of the tower fits with her playing the role of moon maiden to Rhaegar’s solar dragon.   I can’t help but notice that her blood streaking across the sky sounds a bit like a red banner unfurled in the heavens, which matches the Greatjon’s description of the red comet as a “red flag of vengeance for Ned,” unfurled  by the old gods.  The Greatjon’s claim is followed up immediately by the Blackfish’s declaration that the comet represents blood in the sky, another tie-in to the blood-streaked sky at the tower of Joy.  We also saw fiery banners unfurled at the alchemical wedding scene, where moon maiden Daenerys symbolically dies giving birth to dragons, just as Lyanna does in her bed of blood.  Each time, the red banner is unfurled.  Here’s another quote from A Game of Thrones about Lyanna:

He could hear her still at times. Promise me, she had cried, in a room that smelled of blood and roses. Promise me, Ned. The fever had taken her strength and her voice had been faint as a whisper, but when he gave her his word, the fear had gone out of his sister’s eyes. Ned remembered the way she had smiled then, how tightly her fingers had clutched his as she gave up her hold on life, the rose petals spilling from her palm, dead and black.

Here we see the all-important color transformation – blue rose petals turning black. Instead of red blood turning black, we have blue roses turning black – but the point is, it’s a death transformation that brings darkness for the mother of Azor Ahai reborn.  This in turn brings us back to Jon Snow, the black-blooded shadow among shadows armored in black ice.  He’s a perfect fit with the other Lightbringer / Azor Ahai reborn symbols we have examined so far.  He’s the right guy to dream of a burning red sword, as he seems to have inherited some part of the legacy of the Bloodstone Emperor, Azor Ahai.  When he dreams of killing Ygritte and Robb with his burning red sword, Jon is even placed at the top of the Wall, and thus, in the celestial realm.  When Jon stole Ygritte, he did so at the top of the Skirling Pass, high in the Frostfangs – and thus, once again, Lightbringer is forged high in the celestial realm.

Jon’s Caesar-like assassination at the end of A Dance with Dragons may well be the legacy of the sacrificed Amethyst Empress, Nissa Nissa, coming home to roost, because as I said, Azor Ahai reborn is also Nissa Nissa reborn.    There’s actually some more stuff to analyze here at the Tower of Joy which we will come back for once we introduce some concepts later in the program that need to be understood first.

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BREAKER OF (HELIO)TROPES

The Bloodstone Emperor worshipped a “black stone” that fell from the sky around the time of the onset of the Long Night.  If the destruction of the second moon was in fact responsible for the Long Night, then this black stone is almost certainly a piece of the exploded moon.  The Bloodstone Emperor comes from a line of God-Kings said to have descended from the stars, and he is also said to be the first High Priest of the “Church of Starry Wisdom.”  Clearly, there is a lot of astronomical ideas swirling about the Bloodstone Emperor, this man who would be like a god, who stole the fire of the heavens by plucking a star from the sky.  But what about the “bloodstone” itself?  Why did George choose this stone to represent the “prince of darkness?”  The answer to this question reveals much, I have found.

It turns out that although it kind of sounds like some made up fantasy name for a magic stone, “bloodstone” is a real gemstone, and it’s proper name is “heliotrope” (many of you will know this, but it must be said).  In A Song of Ice and Fire, Martin has personified the natural qualities of obsidian (cooled and hardened magma) into magical qualities (frozen fire, possessing the essence of fire magic), and he seems to have done the same with his fantasy-novel version of bloodstone (heliotrope).  To see just what kind of magical stone we might be dealing with here, let’s take a look at the (as it turns out) exceedingly rich folklore surrounding bloodstone / heliotrope.   I have to warn you – this is going to blow your mind a little.  In a nutshell, what I found is that all of the mythical associations of bloodstone seem to match some aspect of the proposed Lightbringer / moon-destruction scenario.  There are way too many specific correlations for me to believe George chose the name “Bloodstone Emperor” for the dude who caused the Long Night by happenstance.  I don’t know which idea came first for him, what idea led to what, but after looking into the bloodstone stuff I am left with the impression that Mr. Martin has had these ideas in mind more or less from the start. You’ll have to judge for yourself.  I’m going to first list the properties and associations in bullet point form, and then expound on each in their own section.  

Bloodstone is associated with the following ideas and symbols:

• increasing personal power, physical & spiritual – it’s called the “the warrior’s stone” & “stone of courage”
• magical warfare, divination, alchemy, and astrology
• “the martyr’s stone”  – associated with Christ’s blood dripping on stone
• healing, blood circulation, vitality
• curing blood poisoning, drawing out snake venom from a wound
• turning, reflecting, or bending the sun’s light; or turning to face the sun
• turning the sun’s reflection to blood when submersed in water
• “sun stone” – as a sun-mirror, heliotrope possess the power of the sun
• predicting eclipses
• predicting and even causing lighting and thunderstorms
• heliotropic plants which turn to face the sun
• “mother goddess stone,” Isis, Astarte, Innana, etc – lunar goddesses who resurrect the sun god

As we go through each of these ideas, we will examine how they correlate to two things: the cataclysmic events involved in the Long Night disaster, and the character and nature of Azor Ahai and Lightbringer. I know I’ve said it a bunch of times by now, but the nature of Lightbringer and Azor Ahai is darkness and shadow, burning blood and fire transformation, and of course, death.

(I must also pause to give a huge shout-out to Westeros.org user Durran Durrandon, who pointed me towards the associations of heliotrope early on in the process. Durran has been one of my most important collaborators from the very start, contributing several key ideas. Thanks buddy. Here’s a link to several of his essays: The Amethyst Empress Reborn | The Long Night and the Great Summer | Melisandre and the Night’s Queen | Jon and Beric: Fire Consumes. Cold Preserves)

Magical Properties, Warrior’s Stone

Bloodstone is considered to have many magical properties by ancient man.  The Babylonians and Egyptians used it for divination and to achieve victory in magical warfare.  It was thought to increase personal power, spiritual first and foremost, but also physical power, which is why it was sometimes known as the “warrior’s stone” and the “stone of courage.”  It was a must-have for ancient magicians, alchemists, and astrologers, as it was thought to aid in communication with the celestial realms.  All of that fits with our idea of the Bloodstone Emperor Azor Ahai, a sorcerer-king with starry wisdom who was known as the warrior of fire.  The warrior associations are more general and could be coincidental, but the bit about communicating with heavenly realms is a very specific and central theme of the Bloodstone Emperor.   He worshipped a black stone, which seems likely to be a moon meteor, and I think the implication is that it aided him in his dark magic.  Are these black moon meteors to be thought of as “bloodstones?”  Well, yes, that’s the case I am making, as you will see.  This is a major premise of this essay, one which we will build on as we go.

The Martyr’s Stone

The most important connotation of bloodstone is the association with Christ’s blood, or more generally speaking, the notion of bloodstone as a stone consecrated with the blood of a dying god.  Actual heliotrope stone is a type of dark green chalcedony with bright red (and occasionally yellow) inclusions.  The red spots usually resemble smears of paint or blood – hence the name “bloodstone.”  At some point in history, the idea came about that Christ’s blood had dripped on to some green chalcedony at the foot of the cross, creating the bloodstone, and that bloodstone was therefore symbolically or spiritually connected to his blood and its power.  I believe this is exactly how we should think of George’s fantasy version of bloodstone – the corpse of the sacrificed moon goddess, soaked in her blackened blood.  These meteors represent Lightbringer, and Lightbringer was covered in the blood of Nissa Nissa, who represents the moon goddess.  I think it’s a nice parallel.

Real bloodstone is green and red, as I mentioned, but as we’ve seen, fire transformation produces black blood, and so his bloodstone is black.  It figures that these meteors would be black, since the moon’s blood was burned black when it was transformed by the fire of the Lightbringer comet.  This idea appears in the Qarthine tale as the moon dragons drinking the sun’s fire.  As I have hopefully made clear, Lightbringer is the offspring of sun and moon, of solar fire and moon blood.  The result is black bloodstone moon meteors, burning with red fire as they descend through the atmosphere.  They’ve been consecrated with the blackened blood of the moon goddess, making them bloodstones in this very important sense of the word.

We discussed the nature of fire transformation a bit last time, taking a look at the examples of when someone “has the fire inside them.”  We saw that Dany had the fire inside her after her wake the dragon dream, where she dreams of undergoing dragon transformation while Mirri Maz Durr delivers dead baby Rhaego in the tent of dancing shadows, and again during the Alchemical Wedding scene where she steps into the fire to wake dragons from stone.  Both scenes also involve burning blood and symbolic moon maiden death.  Dany’s earlier dragon dream, where the bloody black dragon engulfs her in fire, also matches these fire transformation scenes, complete with burning blood and Dany being “tempered” like a sword.

We also looked at two Melisandre fire transformation scenes – the birthing of the shadow baby and her fire vision in A Dance with Dragons – and we saw burning black blood and copious Lightbringer symbolism in both.  In the latter scene, Mel has “the fire inside her, searing and transforming her,” giving us a clear indication that human beings can literally transform their bodies with fire and sorcery into something… less than human.  It’s not just a symbolic transformation – Melisandre doesn’t need to eat, and barely needs to sleep – and even hopes to get to the point where she no longer has to sleep at all.  We don’t know if she always has black blood, or just during these ecstatic experiences, but it’s clear black blood and fire transformation go together.

There are actually a couple of other instances of black blood worth taking a look at as well, beginning with the Lightning Lord, Beric Dondarrion, in A Storm of Swords.  There’s quite a lot of rich symbolism around “the Lord of Corpses,” most of which will come in one of upcoming sections concerning lighting and thunderstorms, but the main thing to understand for the moment is that he has undergone fire transformation, and therefore bleeds black blood:

“Finish him!” Greenbeard urged Lord Beric, and other voices took up the chant of “Guilty!” Arya shouted with the rest. “Guilty, guilty, kill him, guilty!”

Smooth as summer silk, Lord Beric slid close to make an end of the man before him. The Hound gave a rasping scream, raised his sword in both hands and brought it crashing down with all his strength. Lord Beric blocked the cut easily …

“Noooooo,” Arya shrieked.

… but the burning sword snapped in two, and the Hound’s cold steel plowed into Lord Beric’s flesh where his shoulder joined his neck and clove him clean down to the breastbone. The blood came rushing out in a hot black gush.

I couldn’t just quote the last line – it seemed disrespectful of Lord Beric to not give his death scene a tiny bit of lead-in.  Plus I’m a big fan of Mortal Kombat and so I had to get the “Finish him!” in there.  But yeah, once again, we that fire transformed beings have blackened blood.  As we know, Beric has been reanimated by Thoros’s fiery kiss, so the black blood is to be expected.  Lady Stoneheart was in turn resurrected by Beric’s fiery kiss, and she too has blood that is described as black.  Finally, notice that the Hound’s blow clove Beric clean down to the breastbone – this is a match for Nissa Nissa bearing her breast and being stabbed in the heart.  Quite often we’ll see mentions of a breast or a heart being burned or stabbed.

Another nice little hidden example of having the fire inside you comes from A Dance with Dragons, where Varamyr Six-skins recalls being burnt out of the sky while skinchanging Orell’s eagle:

His last death had been by fire.  I burned.  At first, in his confusion, he thought some archer on the Wall had pierced him with a flaming arrow … but the fire had been inside him, consuming him.  And the pain …
. . .

He died his first death when he was only six, as his father’s axe crashed through his skull.  Even that had not been so agonizing as the fire in his guts, crackling along his wings, devouring him. When he tried to fly from it, his terror fanned the flames and made them burn hotter.  One moment he had been soaring above the Wall, his eagle’s eyes marking the movements of the men below.  Then the flames had turned his heart into a blackened cinder and sent his spirit screaming back into his own skin, and for a little while he’d gone mad.  Even the memory was enough to make him shudder. (ADWD, Prologue)

The black blood symbol in the scene, Varamyr’s heart, which has been burnt to a blackened cinder.    The flaming arrow is a definite Lightbringer / meteor symbol, and “shuddering” is a phrase we’ve seen used often when the moon maiden dies.  Varamyr is no maiden – that’s for sure – but that’s okay, symbolism can be gender-flexible.  He’s burnt out of the sky by a fire sorcerer, and I believe that is a match for the idea of the Bloodstone Emperor Azor Ahai, certainly a fire sorcerer, using dark magic to cause the fall of the Long Night by burning the moon goddess out of the sky.  We’re not sure how he did it, what method was used – but all of the myths which involve things descending from heaven which we examined earlier seem to place a human in the role of fire-stealer, goddess-stealer, etc.  I’ve got some ideas about this, but this is most definitely a huge subject which will need to wait for it’s own airtime.

So, fire transformation equals black blood and burning blood.  We got that.  Now let’s get back to the idea of bloodstone representing a stone which is consecrated with the blood of a deity by taking another look at Dany’s “dragon dream” from A Game of Thrones:

Yet when she slept that night, she dreamt the dragon dream again. Viserys was not in it this time. There was only her and the dragon. Its scales were black as night, wet and slick with blood. Her blood, Dany sensed. Its eyes were pools of molten magma, and when it opened its mouth, the flame came roaring out in a hot jet. She could hear it singing to her. She opened her arms to the fire, embraced it, let it swallow her whole, let it cleanse her and temper her and scour her clean. She could feel her flesh sear and blacken and slough away, could feel her blood boil and turn to steam, and yet there was no pain. She felt strong and new and fierce.  […]

“Khaleesi,” Jhiqui said, “what is wrong? Are you sick?” 

“I was,” she answered, standing over the dragon’s eggs that Illyrio had given her when she wed. She touched one, the largest of the three, running her hand lightly over the shell. Black-and-scarlet, she thought, like the dragon in my dream. The stone felt strangely warm beneath her fingers … or was she still dreaming? She pulled her hand back nervously.  (AGOT, Daenerys)

Drogon and the other two dragons are referred to often as Dany’s children, and it seems likely that this black dragon in her dream is a representation of Drogon, as Dany directly compares it to Drogon’s egg after waking.  Indeed, the dream dragon is slick with Dany’s blood, just as if it were her child.  The whole idea here is that the moon dies and bleeds upon her stone meteor children, creating bloodstone, and here we see Dany’s dragon child covered in her blood as she undergoes symbolic death and fire transformation.  Her child is depicted as a black dragon, covered in her blood, which is also burning in this scene.  Lightbringer caught on fire after it was covered in blood.  The red comet is either described as burning or bleeding.  Fire and blood, people, that’s the recipe.  That’s exactly how I am seeing the meteors – black dragon stones, covered in burning moon blood.  Black bloodstones, on fire.

I mentioned before that we’d return to the Tower of Joy, and now it’s time, because we’ve got a moon maiden making some bloodstone.  Here is Ned, recalling the tower “long fallen” in A Game of Thrones:

Martyn Cassel had perished with the rest. Ned had pulled the tower down afterward, and used its bloody stones to build eight cairns upon the ridge. It was said that Rhaegar had named that place the tower of joy, but for Ned it was a bitter memory. They had been seven against three, yet only two had lived to ride away; Eddard Stark himself and the little crannogman, Howland Reed. He did not think it omened well that he should dream that dream again after so many years.

Bloody stones as cairns, do you say?  It’s not clear who’s blood is on the stones, or if this is even a literal sentence – I believe the thought Ned is having here is that the stones of the fallen tower are symbolic of the death of so many good people.  The entire site is “covered in their blood,” in the sense that they all died there.   Of course chief of all these deaths is that of Lyanna, although Ned does not bury her with the rest.  Assuming that her bed of blood was in that tower – it’s not specifically stated, only strongly implied, to be technically accurate – the stones are first and foremost covered in her blood.  This completes the symbolism of Lyanna as the Nissa Nissa moon maiden, mother of Lightbringer: as she lay dying, her blood covered the stones, and she gave birth to a dragon.  Lightbringer is born amidst the bloody stones of the dying moon maiden – you get the idea.

Considering again the symbol of the tower as reaching into the heavens, we can see that the pulling down of the tower adds to the falling celestial object imagery.  The stones that that fell from the heavens are the ones with moon maiden blood on them, that’s the message here.

There’s a great match to this to be found in Dany’s “wake the dragon” dream in A Game of Thrones, which we have discussed quite a bit already.  Early on the dream, we read:

“You don’t want to wake the dragon, do you?”  She was walking down a long hall beneath high stone arches.  She could not look behind her, must not look behind her.  There was a door ahead of her, tiny with distance, but even from afar, she saw that it was painted red.  She walked faster, and her bare feet left bloody footprints on the stone.

Dany is creating bloodstone, just as Lyanna did.  This dream culminates in Dany’s symbolic fire transformation into the Last Dragon, where her blood burns and she sprouts wings of shadow.   This process represents the forging of Lightbringer – the death of the moon by fire and the pouring fourth of dragons.  There’s no real reason for her feet to be bleeding in this dream, except for the symbolic purpose of showing the moon goddess creating bloodstone with her own blood as she undergoes fire transformation.   Later in the dream, her feet progress to melting the stone, just as the comet stone would melt and fuse with the moon rocks, and just as those moon meteors would melt and fuse with the earth where they landed.  Recall also the Alchemical Wedding, where Dany visualized walking into the fire so that she and Drogo can melt together and fuse as one as they forge a Lightbringer together.  Bloody stone and melting or burning stone belong together, and that’s why they keep appearing together in the middle of Lightbringer forging metaphors.  Dany’s wake the dragon dream has most of the key elements of a Lightbringer forging – a moon maiden with burning blood transforming into a dragon, bloody stones and melting stones, and there’s even an appearance of flaming swords in there, although I didn’t quote it here.  Therefore, I don’t think it’s coincidence that we find moon maidens making bloody stones both in this dream and at the Tower of Joy.

And finally, it must be said, making swords involves melting metal as well, and of course these moon meteors can be seen as flaming swords, so we can see that all of these ideas have a certain unity.  Lightbringer is all about fire and blood, as we’ve seen.  The bloodstone meteors make a lot of sense as Lightbringer symbols, both having been made with goddess blood and solar fire.  Both are made with blood sacrifice, and both set on fire.  Both can symbolize dragons.  But are the moon meteors merely symbolic of Lightbringer?  If Azor Ahai was in fact the Bloodstone Emperor as I propose, then it seems to me that he may well have made his sword from the the black meteor which the Bloodstone Emperor was said to have worshipped.  I’m not sure if this is like an inverted, parallel version of the legend of Dawn and Starfall, or if the Dawn story originated in the east and was transplanted to Starfall – we’ll certainly ponder these questions in the future.  The point is that the Starfall legend gives us the general concept of a sword made from a meteor, a mythological precedent if you will, and from the Dawn Age as well.

In addition to these reasons, I like the idea of Azor Ahai’s Lightbringer being made from the Bloodstone Emperor’s black stone because falling stars seem like the place where the celestial and terrestrial stories are interacting.  Indeed, that’s the very significance of meteorites as fallen stars, the fire of the gods, etc – they represent the celestial realm descending to the realm of man.  Lightbringer is a word which is synonymous with “Morningstar,” as I said, and the defining characteristic of deities and mythological figures associated with the Morningstar is that they descend from heaven and bring celestial knowledge and power to mankind.  I believe that the A Song of Ice and Fire equivalent of the hermetic principle of “as above, so below” dictates that the events in the celestial realm should be manifested on the ground in parallel events.  Nissa Nissa represents the second moon, but I do think she was also a real person or perhaps even a whole tribe of people who were slaughtered to work blood magic and create Lightbringer the flaming sword.. something along those lines.  The falling stars are the thing which connects the celestial and terrestrial realms, and they are the heart of the Lightbringer story.   If Lightbringer was made from a moon meteor, then we have a perfect nexus point for all the various incarnations of the Lightbringer story.

When I think about a sword made from a black meteor, I can’t help but think of Valyrian steel, which is a grey so dark that it looks practically black.  Ned’s Ice is said to have a “dark glow” and Valyrian steel in general to have a “smokiness to its soul.”  These swords are forged in dragonfire, of course, and it’s rumored that blood sacrifice is involved as well.   Marwyn the Mage tells us that all Valyrian magic was in fact rooted in blood and fire. Blood magic and fire magic…  hmm.   Sounds a bit like that old Lightbringer recipe we’ve heard so much about.

The “heat, hammer, and fold” language of the Azor Ahai myth suggest a folded steel making process, which is how Valyrian steel is described.  It makes a lot of sense for Azor Ahai’s sword to be a kind of predecessor to Valyrian steel, if indeed Azor Ahai the fire dragon was a dragonlord.  And like Valyrian steel, Lightbringer must have been a black sword, if was in fact made from a black meteor.  Perhaps Salladhor Saan was right when he called Lightbringer a “burnt” sword – that’s a match for bloodstone meteors who have been burned black by drinking the sun’s fire and coated in burning black moon blood.  It’s also a match for black ice / red fire Jon Snow as a symbol of Lightbringer, a black sword burning red in the darkness.  Although Lightbringer was a burnt sword, it also burned, just as the falling black meteors would have burned red in the sky.  Jon’s actual burning red sword in the scene is Longclaw, also a black sword.

All the symbolism seems to agree: Azor Ahai had a black sword that burned red.  Or perhaps it burned with fire that matches the fire of the black dragons, Drogon and Balerion (and presumably the Cannibal): black fire, shot through with streaks of red, or sometimes red and gold.  The ancestral sword of House Targaryen is named Blackfyre, after all.  Perhaps that’s a foggy memory of Lightbringer.  I suppose that at night, you’d really only notice the red parts of the black fire anyway, so you could still describe it as burning red.

Speaking of House Targaryen, their sigil is a three headed red dragon on a field of black – that sounds a lot like three dragon meteors, burning red against the night sky.  Let’s review: their words are “fire and blood,” a recipe for Lightbringer;  their sword is called Blackfyre; their sigil is a blood red dragon on a field of night; and they are famous for making black swords, probably with blood sacrifice.  I think we can see the picture George is painting for us, and it’s remarkably consistent: black swords, burning red, which were made with fire and blood, and in more than one sense.  The swords were forged with dragon fire and human blood sacrifice, and they were smithed out of “bloodstone” moon meteors, which were themselves made with solar fire and moon blood.

House Blackfyre takes their name from the sword Blackfyre, and they invert the Targaryen colors, showing a black dragon on a field of red.  If the Targaryen sigil shows burning red comets or meteors against a field of night, then perhaps the Blackfyre sigil is just a zoomed in view of the same – now we see the core of the comet or meteor, a black dragon, which is surrounded by red fire.  Like the Bloodstone Emperor Azor Ahai, Daemon Blackfyre was a famous usurper who tried to take his sibling’s throne.  It’s probably not a coincidence to find that legacy of the Blackfyres, the Golden Company, was lead for a long time by a man called “the Blackheart” – Miles Toyne, who is himself descended from famous usurpers.  Recall also Varamyr’s heart, burned to a blackened cinder by the power of R’hllor, and the black blood which is the hallmark of fire transformation.  What pumps black blood?  Black hearts, of course.  Lightbringer boils and burns the blood, and it stabbed Nissa Nissa in the heart, so we should expect to see blackened and burned hearts connected to Lightbringer.  Lightbringer is like a fiery spider or vampire – it burns hearts and then drinks the blackened blood.

While we’re talking black fire, we should also mention shadow-fire.  The term shadow fire is from one of Dany’s visions in the House of the Undying in A Clash of Kings.  The exact line is “from a smoking tower, a great stone beast took wing, breathing shadow fire.”  Most have interpreted this as a reference to Young Griff, who claims to be Aegon VI Targaryen but who is probably a Blackfyre, and Jon Connington, the “Griffin reborn” who is turning to stone via his greyscale infection (the “Griffin Reborn” is one of the chapter titels for Jon Connington, in case you’re wondering where I got that).  The idea here is that JonCon is the stone beast, fAegon Blackfyre is the shadow fire, with the two of them combining to invade Westeros.  This interpretation may or may not be correct – it probably is –  but I think there’s also a layer of astronomical symbolism which his easy to decipher.  The top of the tower tells us we are talking about a celestial scene; the smoking tower indicates fire in the heavens and celestial catastrophe; the stone beast taking wing from the heavens is of course the meteors and the reborn red comet; and the shadow fire is a reference to black fire – fire which brings not light, but shadow.  That’s the sort of fire these black meteors are associated with, I think, and quite possibly the kind of fire that Lightbringer had.  We see the black dragons breathing black fire, and we see that the shadow baby that was created from Stannis’s life fires has a “shadowsword” version of Lightbringer.  Essentially, the idea of black or shadowy fire bursts the bubble of misinformation about Azor Ahai’s sword.  A sword of fire?  Yes.  One that brought light and love to the world?  Eh… perhaps not.

Finally, notice that parelles between the JonCon / fAegon interpretation and the astronomical one I just laid out.  The stone beast refers to either JonCon, “the Griffin reborn” who is kissed by fire, or to Azor Ahai reborn, the fiery red comet.  Both are red & fiery reborn things, and for what it’s worth, the griffin as a mythological beast is really an offshoot of dragon lore, as are basilisks.  The shadow fire either refers to “fAegon Blackfyre” (if that’s who he is), a black dragon and would-be usurper, or to the usurping black dragon Azor Ahai the Bloodstone Emperor and his black sword which may have lit up with black and red fire.  To add to the symbolic parallels, it seems possible or even probable that Illyrio possessed the sword Blackfyre and has passed it along to fAegon in one of those chests of goods he sent with Jon Connigton.  Many have proposed this, and I think that the astronomy angle here might be a corroboration of this idea.  Usurping black dragons should wield swords of black fire, according to everything we’ve examined so far.

One last thing about “fAegon Blackfyre” – many see a parallel between the black iron dragon pieces of the sign of the inn formerly known as the “Clanking Dragon” as metaphor for fAegon as a Blackfyre.  These are the ones which the Elder Brother refers to as having washed up on the Quiet Ilse in A Feast for Crows.  The notion is that the black iron dragon pieces turned up on the other side of a body of water coated in red rust, and that that is a metaphor for a black dragon (a Blackfyre) from across the Narrow Sea claiming to be a red dragon (a Targaryen).  This too builds on the idea that the Blackfyre sigil represents the black hearted moon meteors and black Lightbringer burning red.  Black iron dragons coated in red, a black dragon on a field of red, a black sword burning red – it’s the exact same image.  Just as Dawn was supposedly made from the “heart” of a fallen star, I am proposing that Azor Ahai’s Lightbringer was made from the black and burned heart of the moon, the black heart which became the bloodstone meteors.  The black bloodstone meteors are coated in burning black heartblood, and they are pieces of the black heart of a burned star.

Ned’s black Valyrian steel sword Ice, a Lightbringer symbol in its own right, deserves another mention here, because it acts just like a bloodstone.  Ned’s own sword drinks his blood, just as the moon meteor “swords” are coated in the moon’s own blood, and just as Lightbringer drank Nissa Nissa’s blood.  If the original Lightbringer was made from a moon meteor, then Lightbringer really did drink Nissa Nissa’s blood, in more than one sense.  The legend tell us that the blood and soul of Nissa Nissa went into the steel when she was sacrificed to light the sword, and if Lightbringer was a moon meteor sword, the bloody stones  of the dead moon goddess also went into the steel of Lightbringer.  Either way, Lightbringer contains the blood of the moon maiden.

Consider again black ice / red fire Jon Snow as a symbol of both the bleeding stars and Lightbringer the sword.  If Lightbringer was made from a moon meteor, it makes even more sense that black ice / red fire Jon would symbolize both the bleeding stars – black ice or black iron, burning red – and Lightbringer – black steel, burning red.

This means that Dawn probably cannot be Azor Ahai’s Lightbringer – it’s the wrong color.  It’s also called the Sword the Morning, and it seems like Azor Ahai’s black sword was more like a sword of the evening, a sword of nightfall.  This is probably an opportune time to mention that Dalton Greyjoy, the “Red Kracken,” had a Valyrian steel sword called “Nightfall,” which even has a moonstone in the pommel.  Real moonstones are blue and white, but of course the word “moon-stone” also puts in mind of the moon meteors.  A sword of Nightfall, made with moon meteors – that’s the picture we are already seeing for Lightbringer as it is.

Thinking about the implications of a milky blue-white stone in the pommel of a black steel sword reminds me of the fact that Jon’s black steel sword, Longclaw, has a pale stone for a pommel.  A pale stone makes us think of the sword Dawn, made from a apple stone, and milky blue-white stones remind us of milkglass.  Moonstones even have an optical shimmer called adularescence which means that they can be said to be “alive with light,” like the sword Dawn.  Perhaps we are seeing a duality here with these two swords that may be made from meteorites, the black sword and the white sword.  I certainly think about them as a pair, the swords of the morning and evening.

Did Dawn come from an unburnt moon meteor, or perhaps a piece of the unburnt comet which broke off before impact, left behind in the cometary field of debris?  Perhaps it’s a piece of the surviving moon which took a bit of shrapnel and chipped of some pale meteorites?  I’ve even speculated that the two moons Planetos used to have were “moons of Ice and Fire” – you have to admit, it makes a certain amount of sense – with the destroyed moon that gave birth to fiery dragons being the “fire moon,” and the surviving moon whose pale light the Others seem to like so much being the “ice moon.”  If Dawn comes from a piece of this hypothetical “ice moon,” it makes sense for Dawn to be pale and looking like milkglass, alive with light, just as the Others have “pale swords” which are “alive with moonlight” and bones which are “pale and shiny like milkglass.”

These two swords may perhaps be rooted in the same ancient technology, with Dawn representing a pure form of it and Azor Ahai’s black sword being the corrupted version.  This would match with the idea of Lightbringer being white hot and smoking before being covered in blood which we discussed last time as well as the idea that the comet itself had a normal white and blue tail before being transformed to red by the moon explosion.

Finally, I mentioned that Dany’s wake the dragon dream contains a vision of people with gemstone eyes and silver and gold hair who hold burning swords of pale flame and who seem to be her ancestors.  The gemstones in their eyes match the gemstones associated with the Great Empire of the Dawn, the rulers who came before the Bloodstone Emperor’s Blood Betrayal and usurpation of the Amethyst Empress, before Lightbringer was created, before the Long Night and before Valyria’s existence.  Purple-eyed, silver-haired people from the Dawn Age, and holding swords of pale fire.  Perhaps this is a clue that the sword Dawn represents Dawn Age, pre-Lightbringer flaming sword technology, and that Dawn has the ability to light up with pale flame to match the pale stone from which it was made.

The idea of the swords of the morning and evening coming from the same technology might have a parallel in the Morningstar, Venus, which is also the Evenstar.  Venus switches between these two positions – between rising just before sunrise and just after sunset – every two hundred-something days, which is why so many Morningstar-based mythical characters die and are resurrected as some kind of lord of night or lord of the afterlife or underworld.  Osiris and Quetzalcoatl and Mithras are reborn to rule the afterlife, while the Biblical Lucifer becomes the King of Hell and Biblical Jesus is resurrected as the Lord of Heaven.  Azor Ahai is resurrected as the King of the Nightlands – you see the parallel.

The point is, the morningstar and evenstar are kind of the same thing, but kind of not.  They are the same star – the planet Venus – but in one configuration, it rules the morning, and the other, the evening.  This could mean that the swords of the morning and evening come from the same place, or that they are opposite versions of one another, or anything along those lines.  I don’t think it’s likely, but it might even mean that Dawn IS in fact Azor Ahai’s black sword, somehow transformed white.  The Sword of the Evening transformed into the Sword of the Morning, just as Venus transforms from Evenstar to Morningstar and back again… something like that.  House Dayne produces an occassional Sword of the Evening (Vorian Dayne) or a Darkstar (Gerold Dayne) as well as the better known white knights with flawless reputations that we known as Swords of the Morning.  The Amethyst Empress and the Bloodstone Emperor sprang from the same loins… but they are not the same person, either.  Pinning down the specifics here is obviously a bit murky, but fun to ponder in any case.

I hope you didn’t mind the little side-track into magic sword talk – I figure that magic swords is the kind of thing everyone likes hearing about, and I figure I should occasionally talk about how all this symbolism might have actual relevance to the plot.  We’ll be returning to this question of the origin of Dawn in the future, and I’m also excited to say that I have collaborated with Aziz and Ashaya of History of Westeros for an episode of their podcast on House Dayne.  It’s a two part episode, with me appearing on the second episode and talking about the potential ancient origins of House Dayne and various origin theories for the sword Dawn.  If you’re listening to this within a couple of weeks of its release, look out for that one in January of 2016.  If January of 2016 is already history for you, then simply most on over to the History of Westeros youtube channel to see me sitting in front of a book case talking about 12,000 year old fake history. 🙂   I’m also on part one, reading the voices for Darkstar and a couple others.

Predicting and Causing Lightning and Thunderstorms

You’ve heard me say a few times now that I think the thunderbolt of the Storm God which the Grey King used to “steal the fire of the gods” was in fact a moon meteor.  I’ve mentioned that because the meteors of the moon explosion are seen as flaming swords, the phrase “A Storm of Swords” is a clever reference to the meteor shower.  We are going to take an in-depth look at Ironborn mythology and theology another time, where we will examine the thunderbolt and lightning motif at length, so I’m just going to introduce it here as being related to Bloodstone.  I’ve also got some really great “storm of swords” symbolism quote pulls for you in that one which I’m looking forward to sharing, such as this one from, appropriately, A Storm of Swords:

When they reached the top of the ridge and saw the river, Sandor Clegane reined up hard and cursed.  The rain was falling from a black iron sky, pricking the green and brown torrent with ten thousand swords.

For now, I just want to introduce the concept: the moon meteors are like a huge thunderbolt, a storm of moon meteors is the penultimate storm of swords, and bloodstone is associated with predicting and causing lightning and thunderstorms.  As we examine various scenes which symbolize the forging of Lightbringer, I’ll just point out the occurrences of lightning, and you can think to yourself “there’s the lightning again, right in the middle of the lightbringer forging.”  😉  We saw it pop up in the alchemical wedding scene as the second dragon’s egg cracked “as loud and sharp as thunder” while the “firestorm” erupted from the solar pyre.  Because the moon was theoretically in eclipse formation when it exploded, the firestorm can be perceived as coming from both the sun and the moon, just as it does in the alchemical wedding, where the moon maiden walks into the sun’s fire, unleashes the firestorm, and crack’s open the dragon’s eggs.  Consider again the idea of Daenerys “Stormborn,” born on “dragon-stone” amidst a gale which killed hundreds, and also Lyanna’s “storm” of rose petals flung across a bloody sky.  The storm and thunderbolt motifs pop up quite often when moon death is being symbolized, and I believe this is because the thunderbolt of the Storm God was indeed a moon meteor.

I think a good way to show how the lightning relates to the Azor Ahai archetype is to have a look at the “Lightning Lord,” Beric Dondarrion.  As a flaming sword wielder, who’s undergone fire transformation, Beric is a prime candidate to be manifesting signs of the Azor Ahai archetype.  As you are about to see, his symbolism is very specific and intentional, so I don’t think it’s happenstance that he is known as the Lightning Lord.  This is his speech about the unifying principle of the Brotherhood without Banners from a Storm of Swords, but don’t pay attention to his speech – pay attention to the descriptions of Beric.

“When we left King’s Landing we were men of Winterfell and men of Darry and men of Blackhaven, Mallery men and Wylde men. We were knights and squires and men-at-arms, lords and commoners, bound together only by our purpose.” The voice came from the man seated amongst the weirwood roots halfway up the wall. “Six score of us set out to bring the king’s justice to your brother.” The speaker was descending the tangle of steps toward the floor. “Six score brave men and true, led by a fool in a starry cloak.” A scarecrow of a man, he wore a ragged black cloak speckled with stars and an iron breastplate dinted by a hundred battles. A thicket of red-gold hair hid most of his face, save for a bald spot above his left ear where his head had been smashed in. “More than eighty of our company are dead now, but others have taken up the swords that fell from their hands.” When he reached the floor, the outlaws moved aside to let him pass. One of his eyes was gone, Arya saw, the flesh about the socket scarred and puckered, and he had a dark black ring all around his neck.  “With their help, we fight on as best we can, for Robert and the realm.”

And this is later in the same chapter, before the battle with the Hound:

Unsmiling, Lord Beric laid the edge of his longsword against the palm of his left hand, and drew it slowly down. Blood ran dark from the gash he made, and washed over the steel.

And then the sword took fire.  Arya heard Gendry whisper a prayer.

“Burn in seven hells,” the Hound cursed. “You, and Thoros too.” He threw a glance at the red priest. “When I’m done with him you’ll be next, Myr.”

This one’s pretty straightforward – Beric wields a flaming sword which he lights on fire with blood magic (he use his own blood, as a true gentlemen does), and he wears a starry cloak.  And he’s called the Lightning Lord.  His hair is red gold – kissed by fire.  His other nickname is the Lord of Corpses, for he is a corpse himself – and of course the Bloodstone Emperor practiced necromancy.  Again we see a combination of Azor Ahai traits and Bloodstone Emperor traits in the same person – the starry cloak and necromancy matches the Emperor, and the flaming sword created with blood magic and R’hllor worship speak of Azor Ahai.

A few other tidbits on Beric: he lives in a black castle, Blackhaven, perhaps a call out to the black city of Asshai which I believe our dark lord hails from.  I can’t help but notice that young Jon Snow is the Lord of Castle Black… and that Dragonstone, the original home of House Targayen and current home of Azor Ahai impersonator Stannis Baratheon , is a black castle… and that the Valyrians are basically known for their fused black stone castles in general… perhaps there’s a theme here.

Beric was engaged to a Dayne, and had a Dayne as a squire, bringing up the subject of Dawn, a magic sword made from a meteorite, and House Dayne itself, a family that continues to manifest purple eyes and silver hair here and there.  I have a whole theory about that, actually, which I simply cannot go into here in any detail, but please visit the link on my wordpress page and take a look at the evidence I’ve gathered, or you can hold off until I turn that one into a podcast.  Suffice it to say that I think the Daynes may have a common ancestor with Valyria, which would of course be the Great Empire of the Dawn of the Amethyst Empress and the Bloodstone Emperor, which I believe Asshai was the capital of.  If there is any connection between Azor Ahai, who is definitely from the east, and the Last Hero of Westeros, then at some point one or both of those two must have travelled from Asshai to Westeros before or during the Long Night.  I believe that this did occur, and that the Daynes are a genetic legacy of those ancient Asshai’i, and so Beric’s connection to House Dayne is intriguing to say the least.  Remember when I speculated that perhaps the Westerosi name of Azor Ahai was Eldric Shadowchaser, or that perhaps Eldric Shadowchaser was the Last Hero, who might have been the son of Azor Ahai?  Well, Beric’s squire is “Edric” Dayne.  Edric and Eldric…  Eldric and Edric… Finkle and Einhorn, Einhorn and FInkle…  Oh my god Eldric Shadowchaser is a homicidal ex-Miami Dolphins kicker!  “Would you like a cookie son?  Laces out…”

Alrighty then, that’s enough of that.  My point is that I think the various characters who manifest Azor Ahai imagery are all telling us something about Azor Ahai and who he was.  To see Beric, the Lightning Lord corpse with a flaming sword and a starry cloak, engaged to a Dayne and with a Dayne as a squire – which is very like a son – may suggest that Azor Ahai or perhaps his son married a Dawn Age Westerosi woman and founded House Dayne.  Similarly, King Stannis, the Lord of a black castle with a flaming sword and two queens, so to speak, has his nephew Edric Storm in his care.  Not a son, but much is made of his blood tie to Stannis.  Again, Edric and Eldric, one letter apart, and the storm reference certainly fits.  To be onset, I’ve actually done a break down of the chapter where Davos smuggles Edric off of Dragonstone, and it’s chock full of Lightbringer stuff, and seems to confirm that Edric Storm is acting like the son of Azor Ahai, Eldric Shadowchaser.  That’s actually where I first spotted the “Eldric as the son of Azor Ahai” pattern.  Stannis and Beric are both Azor Ahai figures, and both have a young Edric placed in their care.  Again, future essay coming.  I have a lot of things in notes and drafts which I am very much looking forward to putting out, but it’s a matter of finding time to do so.

The last thing I’ll say about Beric is this, and it’s more teasing of ideas I don’t have room for in this essay: he sits in a throne of weirwood roots, in a cave – not an official greenseer throne, but very evocative of one, and Bloodraven’s cave in particular.  Like Bloodraven, he has one eye missing.  Bloodraven has a mixed heritage, part dragon (magic rooted in fire and blood) and part First Men (magic rooted in greenseer abilities).  Beric worships R’hllor (magic rooted in fire and blood) in the cave of the Old Gods – a cave of weirwood roots.  He seeks the counsel of the Ghost of High Heart, which may or may not be the same “Hollow Hill” the Brotherhood’s cave is under –  and the Ghost of the High Heart uses the power of the Old Gods and may be part children of the forest herself.  Beric is also called the “wisp o’ the wood,” and wisp means ghost.  Bloodraven is a tree ghost after a different fashion, but that’s a pretty good description.  We’re seeing an intersection of greenseer magic and fire magic with both Beric and Bloodraven… very interesting.  And isn’t Jon Snow part First Men and part dragon?  And part corpse, for that matter?  I suppose he’s part “Ghost” too, if you will.  Jon even received an eye wound, like Beric and Bloodraven, and wears a black clock (though it’s sadly deficient in the way starry-ness).  Jon and Bloodraven were crows, and Beric is called the Scarecrow Knight.  Hmm… Hmmm indeed…   Clearly these connections between greenseer magic and fire magic are worthy of more investigation, especially in such proximity to Azor Ahai manifestations like Beric and Jon Snow.  This also raises the possibility that Bloodraven may be participating in the Azor Ahai archetype manifestation parade, kind of a frightening thought on many levels.

To sum up, I believe that Beric shows us that the “lightning lord” is one of the many facets of the Azor Ahai archetype.  I’ve got a lot more lightning-related evidence to come in the future, and we’ll see it again a couple of times in this essay, but for now let’s move on to the next mythical association of bloodstone which seems to playing a role in the Long Night disaster mythos.

Healing, Blood Circulation, Vitality, Anti-venom

“Healing properties” is definitely one of those generic associations which is made with many, many gemstones – any charlatan by the side of the road can sell you a rock and tell you it will make you feel better – but the idea that bloodstone can effect blood circulation and has the ability to draw out poison (particularly snake venom) is a bit more interesting.  We’ve seen that blood plays a highly important symbolic role in the fire transformation sequence, and that beings that have undergone fire transformation tend to have black blood, either literally or symbolically.  Lightbringer burns the blood, leaving it black.  The other primary cause of black blood in the novels is when someone is poisoned in some way, such as Ser Gregor Clegane after his fight with the Red Viper, or poor old Ralph Kenning at Moat Cailin, poisoned by the darts of bog devils; or when Khal Drogo’s arakh wound became infected and mortified.  Indeed, there is a connection here, because I believe we are supposed to see the moon’s blood as having been poisoned by Lightbringer the comet as well as burned.  Comets can of course be perceived as snakes as easily as dragons, since dragons are thought of as a type of snake or wyrm, and I believe we should think about the poisonous snake idea as one aspect of Lightbringer.

Here’s a little quote to demonstrate the idea of the moon being poisoned by the sun, as well as a hint about “two moons.”   This is from a Tyrion chapter of A Dance with Dragons:

Only the brightest stars were visible, all to the west.  A dull red glow lit the sky to the northeast, the color of a blood bruise. Tyrion had never seen a bigger moon. Monstrous, swollen, it looked as if it had swallowed the sun and woken with a fever. Its twin, floating on the sea beyond the ship, shimmered red with every wave.  

This language seems like a match for the twin swords that symbolize Lightbringer, Oathkeeper and Widows Wail, with its waves of blood and night that shimmer.  We have twin red swords and twin red moons, as well as the implications of a moon that swallowed the sun and become sick and a moon which drowns in the sea.  The “brightest star” phrase may be a reference to the Morningstar, Venus, which is the brightest star in the sky.  The monstrous moon conjures to mind a moon which gives birth to monsters.  “Mother of dragons? Mother of monsters,” as Dany muses to herself.  The idea of a moon having ingested the sun and become sick is also a parallel to Lyanna, who lies sick in her bed of blood.  She had the dragon seed inside her and gave birth to Lightbringer, so of course she is sick.  Dany too was in the depths of fever dream  that lasted for days when dead-dragon-baby Rhaego, a Lightbringer symbol, was born.

The magic associated with Lightbringer seems to be some kind of shadowy fire magic, such as they practice at Asshai – and indeed, the entire region of the Shadowlands by Asshai seems to be exhibiting symptoms of magical toxicity.  We saw earlier that Asshai is built entirely from greasy black stone which “drinks the light” – perhaps this is the same black stone which the Bloodstone Emperor worshipped, or perhaps it’s related to it in some fashion.  If the greasy black stone is moon meteor stone, it makes sense that it would be toxic, as anyone who’s read much H. P. Lovecraft, one of Martin’s major influences, will know.  I certainly think that the current state of Asshai is a result of the Long Night disaster, perhaps the epicenter of Azor Ahai’s dark magical experimentations.  It very well could have been hit by a meteor, or perhaps it had some kind of symbiotic relationship to the destroyed moon.   I’ve wondered if perhaps we might be talking about ice and fire moons, with the destroyed fire moon being tied to what is now the Shadowlands, and the ice moon tied to the heart of winter.  Maybe Asshai used to the “heart of summer,” but was turned to the shadowlands when the moon was destroyed via this magical link.

If the oily black stone at Ashhai and perhaps elsewhere is moon meteor stone, perhaps the “oil” or “grease” on the stone is the physical manifestation of the idea of moon blood.  Of course the moon doesn’t literally have blood – who knows what the oil actually is.  It’s like asking if the weirwood tears are really blood or sap – we aren’t sure, but we are supposed to see them and think of blood sacrifice, which is indeed a part of ancient Northern weirwood ritual and perhaps the magic needed to activate them.  Similarly, the bloodstones seem to be associated with blood magic and fire transformation, as well as toxicity or poison.  There are some symbolic links between blood and oil in the books which we’ll examine a bit later than lend credibility to this idea.

The megalithic city of Yeen on Sothoryos is also built from greasy black stone, and although there’s nothing about drinking the light mentioned as there is in Asshai, the World of Ice and Fire tells us that the jungle plants will not grow near the stone of the city, indicating some kind of toxicity.  There’s lots of other general creepiness there, including a Jamestown-like story of one of Nymeria’s colonies of Rhoynar disappearing there in a single night without a trace, but the interesting thing to note here is the that Asshai and Yeen, the two places where we see a large concentration of greasy black stone, both exhibit magical toxicity of various kinds and degrees.   There’s also a huge stone toad idol on the Isle of Toads in the Basilisks (not far from Yeen), and of course the Seastone Chair.  There is some evidence for magical toxicity or weirdness for those two, but it’s not conclusive.  In A Dance with Dragons, Theon sees the huge black basalt blocks of Moat Cailin slick with rainwater, and thinks that they appear to be coated in a “fine black oil.”  This seems to raise the possibility that Moat Cailin’s black stones might be greasy, but it’s hard to say for sure.  Moat Cailin, however, may be showing signs of toxicity as well – everything in the bogs there are poisonous, even the plants.  It seems much more of a nasty, deadly swamp than a coastal wetlands, and after all, nobody actually lives at Moat Cailin.  The construction style of Moat Cailin matches that of Yeen – huge, square, megalithic blocks.  We’ll come back to discuss these places a bit more in due course.

I’ll take a minute to draw a distinction between oily or greasy black stone, which I believe to be either moon meteor rock or rock burnt black by a moon meteor or it’s magic, and fused black stone, such as the Valyrians were known for.  We know that fused black stone is simply stone melted by dragon fire and shaped and hardened by sorcery, whereas we are given no explanation for the greasy or oily black stone.  We find the fused black stone at Dragonstone, Valyrian cities like Tyrosh and Volantis, in all Valyrian roads, and of course Valyria itself.  We also have two pre-Valyrian fused stone structures at Battle Isle in Oldtown and the Five Forts in Essos, which I believe speak of a pre-Valyrian race of dragonlords which can only be from Asshai, and I would say, the Great Empire of the Dawn.  The idea of pre-Valyrian stone fortresses in the far east AND in Westeros is actually one of the biggest revelations in The World of Ice and Fire, in my opinion, and it provides a backbone of hard evidence for both the existence of Dawn Age, pre-Valyrian dragonlords and the idea that dragonlords – presumably Azor Ahai – came from Asshai to Westeros some time before the Long Night.  This is a big subject which will get it’s podcast, as I mentioned, and of course we’ll be talking about it on the House Dayne episodes of History of Westeros.

In any case, the fused stone we have seen is not greasy, and none of the oily black stone locations seem to be fused stone – the Isle of Toads statue and Seastone chair are carved, and the block of Yeen and Moat Cailin are hewn (cut).  Asshai is a wildcard, as we don’t know what the construction type is there – perhaps it’s fused and greasy.  Until we see them together, however, we have to consider them different types of black stone, although they both pertain to dragons and dragonlords, if my ideas about the Bloodstone Emperor and the moon meteors are correct.

The Bloodstone Emperor is described as the great corruptor, and indeed these black stones from space, the pieces of the moon, seem to have been burnt, blackened, poisoned, and corrupted in their fire transformation, just like dead and corrupted baby Rhaego.  Accordingly, many of the obviously positive mythic “properties” of bloodstone have been inverted, and this is one of those.  Instead of promoting healing and blood circulation, instead of drawing out poison from blood, George’s magical bloodstone does the opposite.  These meteors don’t draw out snake venom, they are the snake venom, the poisonous sun-spears.  If you’re thinking of Oberyn’s poison-tipped spear that he used to fight the mountain, you’ve got exactly the right idea and I promise you, we are getting to that one very shortly, as it has most of the bloodstone ideas going on.  As I mentioned above, Ser Gregor’s blood turns black after he’s bitten by the Red Viper.

Let’s take a quick look at the three examples of blood turned black by poisoning or sickening that I mentioned above, plus a couple other victims of poisoning.  I’m not going to pull any quotes – we’ll just run through them real quick in summary form.

Oberyn the Red Viper is covered in sun symbols, from his armor to the sigil of his house, and the steel tip of his sun-spear is coated in poison – poison that looks like a “fine black oil,” which seems like a callout to the idea that the oily black stones are sun-spears, meteorites.  Oberyn’s poison spear turns Gregor’s blood black.

Ralph Kenning is poisoned and his blood blackened by the darts of “bog-devils” – darts spit from the mouths of devils definitely fit the imagery we have seen elsewhere.  Other lightbringer symbols which come out of the mouth are dragon fire, fiery or bloody tongues, teeth, and there’s that one time Butterbumps dresses all in yellow and spits seeds full in moon maiden’s Sansa’s face – how rude.  In essence, any sharp, flying object is fair game for meteor symbolism, and poisonous devil darts are a pretty good one.

As for Khal Drogo, a solar king, we could trace his blood poisoning to one or both of the arakh wound and the mud poultice that replaced the one made by Mirri Maz Duur.  I’m leaving the poultice alone – yes, we’ve finally found something which I cannot claim to symbolize moon meteors.  I dunno – I just don’t see it.  Arakh’s, however, have a habit of striking like lightning.  Arakhs are also sickle-shaped, which in turn evokes all the moon crescent – sacrificial sickle symbolism, such as in Bran’s last chapter of A Dance with Dragons when the moon is as slender and sharp as the blade of a knife and his weirwood visions end with a person sacrificed to the heart tree with a sickle-shaped blade.

Joffrey is another obvious solar king, and he’s poisoned as well, his bright solar face turned to dark purple, the same color as the poison, which is from Asshai and resembles crystals of black amethysts.  Lots of Lightbringer symbolism there – Asshai, amethyst gems to remind us of the Amethyst Empress and purple eyed dragonlords, and of course our running theme of poison which darkens the blood.  The Ghost of High Heart perceives Sansa and her poison amethyst hairnet as maiden with snakes in her hair.  That’s a nice way to tie together the the poison and black amethyst ideas to that of snakes and snake venom.  A moon full of snakes is exactly right – a moon pregnant with poison lightbringer meteors.  Sansa makes a great moon symbol, wielding her poisonous snakes, and the amethysts reinforce the connection between Sansa, the Amethyst Empress, and the moon maiden archetype.

Good ole King Robert – he too has black blood in his deathbed scene.  Was he murdered by a lightbringer symbol?  Well, a boar is a horned animal, so that’s a good start, and Robert calls him a devil, and follows with a “damn me to hell.”  That’s good enough for me – Azor Ahai was the devil, isn’t that what I’ve been saying?  Robert also makes a declaration that the gods must have sent the boar to punish him for wanting to kill Daenerys – who is of course a moon maiden.

What we see in all these instances are Lightbringer symbols poisoning things and turning blood black.  We also see quite a bit of mutual-annihilation, which is exactly what happened when the sun seemed to blow up the moon, only to have the moon debris darken and hide the sun’s face.  Like the moon, the sun is poisoned and blackened by Lightbringer.

Just as the healing properties of bloodstone have been inverted, the Bloodstone Emperor is basically an inverted solar king, a dark sun.  He’s associated with the Lion of Night, which is interesting because lions are usually solar symbols.  What is a lion of night?  Perhaps a darkened sun.  If nothing else, the story of the Long Night is about the darkening of the sun.   The tale of the Blood Betrayal describes the Long Night as the Maiden-made-of-Light turning her face in shame.  That makes it likely that the Maiden-made-of-Light is the sun, for the sun hiding its face is by definition what we need to create a “Long Night.”  Indeed, elsewhere in the Worldbook it refers to this same Yi Tish tale of the Long Night in summary form, and refers to the “sun hiding its face,” instead of the Maiden hiding her face.  The maesters interpret the maiden as the sun, and treat them as interchangeable, and I think they are correct.  What is the sun ashamed of?  Well, destroying the moon, of course (hat-tip to Free Northman Reborn of the Westeros.org forum).

Now originally, the story of the Great Empire of the Dawn begins with the Maiden-Made-of-Light and the Lion of Night in some kind of harmonious equilibrium.  The Long Night disrupts the balance, the Maiden turns her face, and the Lion of Night comes forth in all his wroth during the Bloodstone Emperor’s reign of terror.  What I am proposing is just as Azor Ahai, is the champion of R’hllor, the warrior of fire, the Bloodstone Emperor is the champion of the Lion of Night, the warrior of shadow and black fire.  Now of course I am proposing that these two are one in the same – what we see here is a binary expression of the bright sun and the dark sun.  Just as a person has a shadow, the sun’s shadow is the lion of night, the black dragon.  I mentioned last time that this is a principle of alchemy, and that alchemists perceived the bright sun as a lion and the shadow sun as a dragon.  The Maiden and Lion duality is the same thing, I believe – they are both solar deities, but one is the bright face of the sun and one is the dark face, the sun’s shadow.  You’ll notice that Dany’s animal familiar is called the winged shadow, while Jon’s animal familiar is called a pale shadow.  You’ll also notice the color inversions there – Dany is the “silver queen” with a black shadow, and Jon is all black with a white shadow.  Just as with the Lion of Night and the Maiden-Made-of-Light, we are seeing the light / dark duality.  It was Stannis’s shadow that helped create the shadow baby, just as the sun’s shadow seems to be associated with Lightbringer.  Live Stannis has a bright burning sword; Stannis’s shadow has a cold “shadowsword.”

So now let’s consider again the idea of Mithras and the sword and the torch.  If Lightbringer was a sword and a torch, we might conclude that it’s one of those terrible powers that can be used for good or evil, based on the intent of the wielder, which is a common idea in literature in mythology – it’s a good lesson to teach and learn, because it reflects the true nature of power.  But Azor Ahai’s Lightbringer was not that.  Azor Ahai’s Lightbringer is corrupted – it doesn’t bring light at all.  It’s an un-torch, a dark-bringer.  A sword of Nightfall and Blackfyre, and perhaps even “shadow-fire,” whatever that is.  Shadow fire and black fire both sound like fire whose function has been inverted, and that’s exactly what we’re talking about.  Inverted fire which is not bright for the inverted solar king who brought darkness, the king of the Nightlands.

We might say that Lightbringer technology in general – flaming sword technology, that is – would be the power which can go either way, for good or evil.  If the Great Empire of the Dawn’s pale fire swords represent uncorrupted, pre-Azor Ahai flaming sword tech,  then we can see that flaming sword power can indeed go either way.  Azor Ahai’s Lightbringer, however, is not a powerful weapon which can go either way – it represents power which already went a certain way – down the dark road.  And we aren’t talking about the idea of darkness as a balance to light, or death as a balance to life.  We are talking about cheating and defying death, breaking the cycles of life and of the seasons.  The Long Night is the epitome of this, a winter and a night which never gives way to day and spring.  Lightbringer was the sword that slays the seasons, which is one of the descriptions of the red comet.  Lightbringer literally broke the cycle of the seasons when it caused the Long Night.

Generally speaking, one of the most common ways that the knowledge of the gods or fire of the gods is perceived is as the cup or grail of immortality.  Those who seek it seek to become like gods, defying death.  We see this quest all over A Song of Ice and Fire – with the Bloodstone Emperor of course, as well as most of those other eleven stories I cited above.  We also see people defying death in other places – the Undying of Qarth, who are a great example of what I am talking about, or the seemingly eternal Others, whose every act is a defiance of natural life.  We’ve got the zombies that the R’hllorists make, the wights raised in the North, and even the greenseers might fall into this category, although I think that situation may be more complex.

But as for the Bloodstone Emperor Azor Ahai, we can confidently say that there seems to be very little silver lining to breaking the moon.  It’s one thing to seek after the wisdom of the gods, and it’s another thing to pull the gods down from heaven.  I think that if there was anything positive derived from the disaster, from his sword, or from one of the meteors, it would constitute a reversal, an atonement, a reckoning.  Someone would have had to have figured out a way to undo some of the harm that Azor Ahai caused, perhaps turning his own magic against him or his creations,  or something along those lines.  Perhaps that’s what the Last Hero did – perhaps he was the son of Azor Ahai who went against the evil magic of his father, maybe even by sacrificing himself.  Many have speculated that the Last Hero didn’t simply ride in and slay the Others to end the Long Night – it seems likely to have been more complicated than that, perhaps involving a pact or sacrifice of some kind.  I like these ideas and think they fit well with the themes of the novel.  The Lightbringer myth combines the parallel but opposing themes of death and life, of vile murder and blasphemous hubris on one hand and procreation and self-sacrifice on the other, and so it seems likely sacrifice and procreation might be what’s needed to wash out the stain of someone willing to use blood magic to gain personal power, such as the Bloodstone Emperor Azor Ahai, the dark solar king.

Visions danced before her, gold and scarlet, flickering, forming and melting and dissolving into one another, shapes strange and terrifying and seductive. She saw the eyeless faces again, staring out at her from sockets weeping blood. Then the towers by the sea, crumbling as the dark tide came sweeping over them, rising from the depths.  {…} I saw towers by the sea, submerged beneath a black and bloody tide. (ADWD, Melisandre) Most Valyrian steel was a grey so dark it looked almost black, as was true here as well. But blended into the folds was a red as deep as the grey. The two colors lapped over one another without ever touching, each ripple distinct, like waves of night and blood upon some steely shore. (ASOS, Tyrion) The Bloodstone Compendium Part 1: Astronomy Explains the Legends of Ice and Fire Part 2: Lucifer Means Lightbringer Part 3: The Bloodstone Emperor Azor Ahai Part 4: The Language of Leviathan Part 5: Black and Bloody Tides Part 6: A Thousand Eyes and One Hammer Black and Bloody Tides It’s a new day and a new essay, but we are still translating the language of leviathan, and we are still exploring the mythical associations of bloodstone, all in an attempt to unravel as much as we can about the Long Night disaster.  Thanks for taking this trip with me, I’m grateful to have your attention and I hope to continue to hold your interest. 😉 The leviathan language we’ll speak of here in this essay is the black and bloody tide, which I’ve been mentioning around the margins up to this point.  We’ve firmly established the sea dragon’s slaying and Storm King’s thunderbolt as a moon meteor strike.  We’ve seen the language that this leviathan speaks – earthquakes and shattering of the land, tree death, a rain of fiery swords, and darkness.  Now, recall Pliny’s the Elder’s notion that submersing bloodstone in water turns the sun’s reflection bloody.  This makes even more sense when we think about the bloodstone as the moon meteors – pieces of the moon goddess soaked in her sun-blackened blood which crashed into the ocean and triggered the black and bloody tide.  That’s quite a mouthful; no wonder they just called it a “sea dragon.” Moon Drownings Seek the hill of Nagga and the bones of the Grey King’s Hall, for in that holy place when the moon has drowned and come again we shall make ourselves a worthy king, a godly king.” He raised his bony hands on high again. “ Listen! Listen to the waves! Listen to the god! He is speaking to us, and he says, We shall have no king but from the kings moot!  (AFFC, The Prophet) Let’s take a look at some instances of the moon drowning quotes throughout the story (of which there are many): She took him out onto the terrace that overlooked the city.  A full moon swam in the black sky above Meereen.  “Shall we walk?”  Dany slipped her arm through his.  The air was heavy with the scent of night-blooming flowers.  (ADWD, Daenerys)  The full moon, implying pregnancy and childbirth, floats in a black sea.  Night-blooming flowers evoke the sun-drinking heliotropium flower, appropriately here next to Daenerys, who is associated with both Nissa Nissa and the Amethyst Empress, all three of whom are of course moon maidens.  The night-blooming flowers make the air heavy; that’s surely a reference to the smoke and debris which made up the unfolding flower of darkness. Daenerys received the captain on her terrace, seated on a carved stone bench beneath a pear tree.  A half-moon floated in the sky above the city, attended by a thousand stars.  Daario Naharis entered swaggering.  He swaggers even when he is standing still.  The captain wore striped pantaloons tucked into high boots of purple leather, a white silk shirt, a vest of golden rings.  His trident beard was purple, his flamboyant mustachios gold, his long curls equal parts of both.  On one hip he wore a stiletto, on the other a Dothraki arakh.  “Bright queen,” he said, “you have grown more beautiful in my absence. How is this thing possible?” The queen was accustomed to such praise, yet somehow the compliment meant more coming from Daario than from the likes of Reznak, Xaro, or Hizdahr. “Captain. They tell us you did us good service in Lhazar.” I have missed you so much. “Your captain lives to serve his cruel queen.” “Cruel?” Moonlight glimmered in his eyes. (ADWD, Daenerys) It’s not just these moon drowning motifs by themselves that are significant – it’s the appearance of moon-drowning motifs in the presence of Lightbringer symbolism – a thousand stars attending the floating moon.  Recalling that Daenerys has transitioned into a solar “king” at this point –  I believe Daario is her fire moon “bride,” a compliment to Hizdahr’s icy and impotent frozen cock symbolism.  Golden rings, purple vest and beard (Targaryen purple of course), eyes flashing with moonlight, and his repeated acknowledgement of Dany’s authority as Queen (“bright queen” to reinforce her solar status).  Daario’s purple “trident” beard evokes the three heads of the dragon.  In the next essay, we’ll be talking a bit about the connection between moons and eyes, so just put that in your back pocket. “… sleep, Princess,” Ser Jorah said. “No,” Dany said. “Please. Please.” “Yes.”  He covered her with silk, though she was burning.  “Sleep and grow strong again, Khaleesi.  Come back to us.”  And then Mirri Maz Duur was there, the maegi, tipping a cup against her lips.  She tasted sour milk, and something else, something thick and bitter.  Warm liquid ran down her chin.  Somehow she swallowed.  The tent grew dimmer, and sleep took her again.  This time she did not dream.  She floated, serene and at peace, on a black sea that knew no shore.  After a time— a night, a day, a year, she could not say— she woke again.  The tent was dark, its silken walls flapping like wings when the wind gusted outside.  (AGOT, Daenerys) This last scene was immediately following Daenerys’s “wake the dragon” dream.  The motifs are well familiar to us – Daenerys, as an incarnation of the moon, floats on the black sea that knew no shore – this is highly suggestive of space, the cosmic ocean which has no shore.  This is where we saw the moon swimming in the previous quote – “in the black sky” – so this is a particularly strong and clear metaphor.  Dark flapping tent wings remind us of the dragon, whose birth is being foreshadowed in this scene (and in many other Dany scenes in A Game of Thrones).  There’s a parallel to this scene in the chapter where Danerys eats the stallion’s heart, receives the prophecy of the Stallion Who Mounts the World, and then bathes in the Womb of the World beneath the mother of mountains.  This passage is afire with Lightbringer symbols, but keep an eye out for watery language, which are references to the black and bloody tide: The heart was steaming in the cool evening air when Khal Drogo set it before her, raw and bloody.  His arms were red to the elbow.  Behind him, his bloodriders knelt on the sand beside the corpse of the wild stallion, stone knives in their hands. The stallion’s blood looked black in the flickering orange glare of the torches that ringed the high chalk walls of the pit.   Dany touched the soft swell of her belly.  Sweat beaded her skin and trickled down her brow.  She could feel the old women watching her, the ancient crones of Vaes Dothrak, with eyes that shone dark as polished flint in their wrinkled faces.  She must not flinch or look afraid.  I am the blood of the dragon, she told herself as she took the stallion’s heart in both hands, lifted it to her mouth, and plunged her teeth into the tough, stringy flesh.  {…} Despite the tender mother’s stomach that had afflicted her these past two moons, Dany had dined on bowls of half-clotted blood to accustom herself to the taste, and Irri made her chew strips of dried horseflesh until her jaws were aching.  {…} Her stomach roiled and heaved, yet she kept on, her face smeared with the heartsblood that sometimes seemed to explode against her lips.  Khal Drogo stood over her as she ate, his face as hard as a bronze shield.  His long black braid was shiny with oil.  {…}  The oldest of the crones, a bent and shriveled stick of a woman with a single black eye, raised her arms on high. “Khalakka dothrae!” she shrieked.  The prince is riding! “He is riding!” the other women answered.  “Rakh! Rakh! Rakh haj!” they proclaimed.  A boy, a boy, a strong boy. Bells rang, a sudden clangor of bronze birds.  A deep-throated warhorn sounded its long low note.  The old women began to chant.  Underneath their painted leather vests, their withered dugs swayed back and forth, shiny with oil and sweat.  The eunuchs who served them threw bundles of dried grasses into a great bronze brazier, and clouds of fragrant smoke rose up toward the moon and the stars.  The Dothraki believed the stars were horses made of fire, a great herd that galloped across the sky by night. As the smoke ascended, the chanting died away and the ancient crone closed her single eye, the better to peer into the future.  The silence that fell was complete.  Dany could hear the distant call of night birds, the hiss and crackle of the torches, the gentle lapping of water from the lake.  The Dothraki stared at her with eyes of night, waiting. The prophecy is given, then the party marches down the godsway to the black lake called the Womb of the World.  As they pass the stolen gods and heroes that line the godsway, “the flickering flames made the great monuments seem almost alive.”  Now we get a moon-drowning metaphor to match the previous instances of the moon floating and drowning on a black sea. They rode to the lake the Dothraki called the Womb of the World, surrounded by a fringe of reeds, its water still and calm.  A thousand thousand years ago, Jhiqui told her, the first man had emerged from its depths, riding upon the back of the first horse.  The procession waited on the grassy shore as Dany stripped and let her soiled clothing fall to the ground.  Naked, she stepped gingerly into the water.  Irri said the lake had no bottom, but Dany felt soft mud squishing between her toes as she pushed through the tall reeds. The moon floated on the still black waters, shattering and re-forming as her ripples washed over it. Goose pimples rose on her pale skin as the coldness crept up her thighs and kissed her lower lips. The stallion’s blood had dried on her hands and around her mouth.  Dany cupped her fingers and lifted the sacred waters over her head, cleansing herself and the child inside her while the khal and the others looked on.  (AGOT, Daenerys) Anytime we see “a thousand thousand” something, our ears should prick up, as this is the language of the thousand thousand dragon meteor shower which poured forth from the second moon.  The “shattering and reforming” language is a close match to Daenrys feeling as though “her body had been torn to pieces and remade from the scraps” after her miscarriage in the tent near the end of A Game of Thrones.  I believe this is a reference to the idea of the moon shattering and then being “reformed” in the forging of Lightbringer the sword out of moon meteors.  Lightbringer contains Nissa Nissa’s blood and soul and strength and courage, and it was made form the moon’s scraps, so I think it fits. Dany enters the black water covered in stallion’s blood – we’ve seen the bloody hands and mouths a few times now – and then comes out cold and pale, and seemingly cleansed.  But her child ultimately is not clean – Rhaego comes out of the womb cold and dead after having the fire inside him.  I tend to interpret this again to refer to the forging of Lightbringer the flaming meteor sword in the black water of the sea. We’ve seen that Valyrian steel, though forged in fire like the destroyed moon, has a cold bite – in the case of Longclaw, Ice, and the black steel axe Mormont gives to Craster.  The Dornishman’s blade was made of black steel too, and “it’s bite was as sharp and cold as a leech.”  I don’t want to give away my whole “Dornishman’s Wife” analysis, but recall that Lightbringer, made of black steal, drank Nissa’s blood and soul, a match for the cold, leech-like (blood drinking) bite of the Dornishman’s black steel blade.  The Ironborn, meanwhile, possess those foul black weapons which drink the souls of those they slay.  Finally, we have the concept of obsidian as “frozen fire,” which is capable of ‘sucking the cold’ out of an Other, melting it and leaving the obsidian freezing cold to the touch. If “possessing Nagga’s fire” does in fact equate to those black soul-drinking weapons as I have proposed, then we have the same pattern of events.  When I compare the idea of fiery black steel plunging into black water and coming out with a cold bite to the fiery and bloody moon maiden immersing herself in the black waters and emerging kissed by the cold, I am seeing a similar story.  After praying to the waves to speak to him in the language of leviathan, Aeron Damphair emerges from the waves “gaunt and pale and shivering,” but he has “a fire burning in his heart.”  Dany too, though pale and shivering, retains the fire inside her – the one which will ultimately burn Rhaego to ash.  Valyrian steel has fire locked inside of it, in a manner of speaking, as it was forged in dragon flame.  It may be that only a Valyrian steel sword can become a “Lightbringer,” playing on the idea of a fire locked inside the cold steel. At this point, I have to point out that the cold black pond in the Winterfell godswood, the one in front of the heart tree, bears a striking resemblance to the womb of the world.  Both are cold black bodies of water, and both supposedly have no bottom.  Both are associated with the origin stories of their respective peoples.  The womb of the world gave birth to the first man, riding on the back of the first horse, and the Winterfell heart tree and black pond seem to be among the oldest things at Winterfell, as we are told the keep was built around the godswood.  Bran tastes the blood of the sacrifice victim offered by some very ancient Stark through the black pond, which is somewhat similar to Daenerys eating the horse heart and washing the blood off in the black lake. And here’s the crux of this comparison: Ned Stark washes the blood off of his black steel sword in the black pond. We’ve seen that Ned’s sword symbolizes Lightbringer, the sword made from the black bloodstone moon rock, so again, we have multiple stories that are really telling the same story – bloody black moon stone being immersed in the black water, and coming out cold, but with an inner fire.  And like Damphair and Daenerys, who emerged from the black water chilled and cold, the sword Ice is, at its heart, steel made in dragon fire, and therefore has the inner fire as well. Ned’s Ice is now Widow’s Wail and Oathkeeper, with their “waves of night and blood upon some steely shore.”  Even before this, Ned was symbolically creating the black and bloody tide every time he dipped that black and bloody sword into the black pond.  Both of these ideas serve to tie the black and bloody tide to Lightbringer and the moon meteors. This is a very specific, ritualistic activity that Ned practices – he always cleans the blood off of Ice in that black pond.  This “ritual” was introduced to us in one of the very first chapters in A Game of Thrones, emphasizing its importance: But she knew she would find her husband here tonight. Whenever he took a man’s life, afterward he would seek the quiet of the godswood.  {…} At the center of the grove an ancient weirwood brooded over a small pool where the waters were black and cold. “The heart tree,” Ned called it. The weirwood’s bark was white as bone, its leaves dark red, like a thousand bloodstained hands. A face had been carved in the trunk of the great tree, its features long and melancholy, the deep-cut eyes red with dried sap and strangely watchful. They were old, those eyes; older than Winterfell itself. They had seen Brandon the Builder set the first stone, if the tales were true; they had watched the castle’s granite walls rise around them. It was said that the children of the forest had carved the faces in the trees during the dawn centuries before the coming of the First Men across the narrow sea.  {…} Catelyn found her husband beneath the weirwood, seated on a moss-covered stone. The greatsword Ice was across his lap, and he was cleaning the blade in those waters black as night. A thousand years of humus lay thick upon the godswood floor, swallowing the sound of her feet, but the red eyes of the weirwood seemed to follow her as she came.  {…} He had a swatch of oiled leather in one hand. He ran it lightly up the greatsword as he spoke, polishing the metal to a dark glow.  {…} Ned lifted Ice, looked down the cool steel length of it.  {…} “There was grievous news today, my lord. I did not wish to trouble you until you had cleansed yourself.” First of all, I’d like to note the astronomy metaphor here in the very beginning – a thousand bloodstained hands.  The oily black bloodstone sword idea is present as well – the black sword with a dark glow goes from being covered in blood to being covered in black water to being covered in oil.  We’ve seen that these three things – blood, water, and oil – are all symbolically interchangeable, so its cool to see George introducing this idea to us here, so early on.  Again, this is a “gardener” with a plan.  😉 The important parts of Ned’s ritual are highlighted – it’s the same ritual that Daenerys does, in many ways.  Notice the phrase “waters black as night” applied to the black pond in which Ned washes the blood off of his sword – I hate to beat a dead horse, but “waves of blood and night,” once again.  Daenerys herself represents the moon meteors, the sea dragon, and she cleanses the blood off of her and her child in the cold black waters, just as Ned cleanses the black and bloody sword which represents the moon meteors in the black pond, and in doing so, cleanses himself as well. Just to reinforce this idea, recall the burning of the Seven on Dragonstone, when Stannis thrust his “Lightbringer” into the damp earth, followed by Melisandre singing “in the tongue of Asshai, her voice rising and falling like the tides of the sea.”  The water surrounding Dragonstone is of course the Blackwater Bay, so it’s a very similar scene to the previous two… with the exception that instead of sanctifying or cleansing anything, they were committing deeply sacrilegious acts on Dragonstone.  Small difference.  😉  We’ll have to keep an eye on this theme of purification by fire or by cold black water and see if we can’t sort it out in the future.  But in any case, what we can see in all of these moon drowning quotes is that Lightbringer’s landing on the earth brought forth the black and bloody tides. The Wayward Bride Asha Greyjoy wraps up all these ideas together in a nice little package in a chapter called “The Wayward Bride,” whose title itself is a moon drowning clue.  As will be soon apparent, Asha plays the role of wayward, drowning moon maiden.  She actually goes through the moon-impregnation-by-comet sequence several times in this chapter. “My lady.” The maester’s voice was anxious, as it always was when he spoke to her. “A bird from Barrowton.” He thrust the parchment at her as if he could not wait to be rid of it.  {…} This is poison that I hold, she thought. I ought to burn it. Instead she cracked the seal. A scrap of leather fluttered down into her lap. When she read the dry brown words, her black mood grew blacker still. Dark wings, dark words. The ravens never brought glad tidings. The last message sent to Deepwood had been from Stannis Baratheon, demanding homage.  {…}  It spoke of the fall of Moat Cailin, of the triumphant return of the Warden of the North to his domains, of a marriage soon to be made. The first words were, “I write this letter in the blood of ironmen,” the last, “I send you each a piece of prince. Linger in my lands, and share his fate.”  {…} Ravens are symbols for comets and meteors, and this meteor is a piece of dismembered Ironborn royalty, written in the blood of Ironborn.  This is tight fit with the idea of the Ironborn being people made of iron who possess the sea dragon’s fire. The story of the slain sea dragon, the drowned goddess, is the story of the Ironborn, in a symbolic way. Other ideas attached to the ravens and their fluttering, bloody Ironborn messages: they are “thrust,” they should be burnt, they are “poison” (think of the poisoned black blood and heliotrope’s association with poison), they are very dark, they are cracked open, and the last one was from Stannis (an Azor Ahai symbol).  The association with the fall of Moat Cailin is significant, if only because Moat Cailin is a location associated with the Hammer of the Waters. This is the first moon impregnation sequence – two of them, actually.  Theon himself was dismembered and then sent out in flying pieces of bloody ironborn.  Asha is the second, as  the flying bloody iron is “thrust” at her, bearing news of a marriage.  Her mood then becomes black, she is threatened with dismemberment and skinning (sharing Theon’s fate), and shortly after this, there is a quote about the sun going down behind the trees. The room was cold. Asha rose from Galbart Glover’s bed and took off her torn clothes. The jerkin would need fresh laces, but her tunic was ruined. I never liked it anyway . She tossed it on the flames. The rest she left in a puddle by the bed. Her breasts were sore, and Qarl’s seed was trickling down her thigh. She would need to brew some moon tea or risk bringing another kraken into the world.  {…} In this scene, she’s just made rather violent (but tender) love with Qarl and been impregnated, and her breasts are sore to call to mind Nissa Nissa being stabbed through the breast.  Her clothing represents the crust of the moon – some of it burns, and some of it melts (“in a puddle”). There’s a disturbing connotation of liquid coming from the moon – the black and bloody tide, disguised as tea – which aborts pregnancies.  Of course one immediately thinks of the deformed or even dead lizard-babies that Targayens occasionally birth, chief among them being Dany’s Rhaego, who was born dead as we saw above.  Again we are reminded of the tales of necromancy and other abominations practiced the Bloodstone Emperor, as well as the magically toxic effects of the greasy black bloodstone (at Yeen and Asshai especially – Asshai supposedly has no children at all).  The black bloodstones definitely have an association with warped, twisted magic, and even un-death, un-life, zombification, etc. Returning the narrative, we see two more occurrences of the sea dragons being symbolic of ships, with the word “drowning” thrown in for good measure/: “You are clinging to Sea Dragon Point the way a drowning man clings to a bit of wreckage. What does Sea Dragon have that anyone could ever want? There are no mines, no gold, no silver, not even tin or iron. The land is too wet for wheat or corn.” I do not plan on planting wheat or corn. “What’s there? I’ll tell you. Two long coastlines, a hundred hidden coves, otters in the lakes, salmon in the rivers, clams along the shore, colonies of seals offshore, tall pines for building ships.”  {…} Men and mounts alike were trotting by the time they reached the trees on the far side of the sodden field, where dead shoots of winter wheat rotted beneath the moon. Asha held her horsemen back as a rear guard, to keep the stragglers moving and see that no one was left behind. Tall soldier pines and gnarled old oaks closed in around them. Deepwood was aptly named. The trees were huge and dark, somehow threatening. Their limbs wove through one another and creaked with every breath of wind, and their higher branches scratched at the face of the moon. The sooner we are shut of here, the better I will like it, Asha thought. The trees hate us all, deep in their wooden hearts. Personified trees which scratch at the moon’s face certainly make us think of the story that greenseers were the ones to call down the Hammer of the Waters.  Consider that a preview of a future next essay.  😉 I’ve included these quotes here because of the excellent lunar goddess – harvest connotations.  We mentioned the wheat as a symbol of the harvest in regards to the Tauroctony, but it’s a nearly ubiquitous symbol of the cycle of the seasons and fertility in general, which in turn is frequently associated with lunar goddesses, Astarte (Ishtar) chief among them.  That’s why the rotting wheat harvest appears in the same sentence with the moon.  I believe George is telling us what kind of harvest the sacrifice of the moon brought – a rotten harvest, flooded and dead.  Asha ain’t plantin’ no stinkin’ wheat!  And we are about to see that she is in fact a drowning moon.  This next line made me laugh when I read it. Asha took Tris Botley by the ears and kissed him full upon the lips. He was red and breathless by the time she let him go. “What was that?” he said. “A kiss, it’s called. Drown me for a fool, Tris, I should have remembered— ” She broke off suddenly. When Tris tried to speak, she shushed him, listening. “That’s a warhorn. Hagen.” Her first thought was of her husband. Could Erik Ironmaker have come all this way to claim his wayward wife? “The Drowned God loves me after all.  {…} Asha never beached more than half her ships.  The other half stood safely off to sea, with orders to raise sail and make for Sea Dragon Point if the northmen took the strand.  “Hagen, blow your horn and make the forest shake. Tris, don some mail, it’s time you tried out that sweet sword of yours.”  When she saw how pale he was, she pinched his cheek.  “Splash some blood upon the moon with me, and I promise you a kiss for every kill.”  (ADWD, The Wayward Bride) Our moon maiden is sending half her “fleet” (meteor shower) to Sea Dragon point.  She wants to blow a earth-shaking horn, splash blood on the moon, and see a sweet sword (and right next to the “Sea Dragon Point” pun, for good measure :)).  Kissing and killing recall the dual nature of the Lightbringer myth, which we’ve seen several times through this chapter.  This is a total Lightbringer forging party right here!  Later on in this chapter: She spun and found another wolf behind her, and slashed him across the brow beneath his helm.  His own cut caught her below the breast, but her mail turned it, so she drove the point of her dirk into his throat and left him to drown in his own blood.  A hand seized her hair, but short as it was he could not get a good enough grip to wrench her head back.  Asha slammed her boot heel down onto his instep and wrenched loose when he cried out in pain.  By the time she turned the man was down and dying, still clutching a handful of her hair.  Qarl stood over him, with his longsword dripping and moonlight shining in his eyes.  (ADWD, The Wayward Bride) Our moon maid is spinning and turning, like a moon, and was stabbed in the breast like Nissa Nissa.  We see a blood drowning, and well as a bloody sword and the idea of moonlight being like eyes.  We will return to this chapter to mine all the tree-personification clues lurking in the deep woods when we shift our focus to the weirwood trees… The Wayward Bride is really one of my very favorite chapters in the entire series, and one of the examples of why I think A Dance with Dragons is a terrific book, despite the fact that it doesn’t have its ending battles.  A moonlight battle in the dark woods where your foes are like the trees themselves… yeah.  That’s the stuff. Black Tides According to the Damphair, the red comet which is a burning brand proclaims a rising tide for the Ironborn.  As the Greyjoys plan their attack on the North, Aeron can’t resist prophesying a bit about the sea dragon’s wrath: Aeron Damphair raised his arms. “And the waters of wrath will rise high, and the Drowned God will spread his dominion across the green lands!” (ACOK, Theon) The rising tide of the Ironborn is the black tide, have no doubt: when Jojen green-dreams of the Ironborn invading Winterfell, he perceives it as a black tide.  There’s even a House Blacktyde on the Iron Islands, and “Blind” Beron Blacktyde is one of Aeron Damphair’s drowned men.  Here is Jojen’s dream: “I dreamed that the sea was lapping all around Winterfell.  I saw black waves crashing against the gates and towers, and then the salt water came flowing over the walls and filled the castle.  Drowned men were floating in the yard.  (ACOK, Bran) He had expected that Hodor would come for him, or maybe one of the serving girls, but when the door next opened it was Maester Luwin, carrying a candle.  “Bran,” he said, “you … know what has happened?  You have been told?”  The skin was broken above his left eye, and blood ran down that side of his face. “Theon came. He said Winterfell was his now.” The maester set down the candle and wiped the blood off his cheek. “They swam the moat.  Climbed the walls with hook and rope.  Came over wet and dripping, steel in hand.”  He sat on the chair by the door, as fresh blood flowed.  “Alebelly was on the gate, they surprised him in the turret and killed him. Hayhead’s wounded as well. I had time to send off two ravens before they burst in. The bird to White Harbor got away, but they brought down the other with an arrow.”  (ACOK, Bran) The black waves symbolize the Ironborn invasion, the “drowned men” who came over the walls wet and dripping.  Notice the next sentence contains “as fresh blood flowed,” suggesting a connection between a blood tide and a black tide.  Jojen’s vision also prophesies the drowning of Mikken, Winterfell’s smith, but it turns out that he drown on blood: The bald man drove the point of his spear into the back of Mikken’s neck.  Steel slid through flesh and came out his throat in a welter of blood.  A woman screamed, and Meera wrapped her arms around Rickon.  It’s blood he drowned on, Bran thought numbly. His own blood.  (ACOK, Bran) This is an important passage, because it’s one of the few times that George clearly states a symbolic equivalency, serving up confirmation on a silver platter.  Bran tells us that drowning in water can mean drowning on blood, so we don’t really even have to guess about that. Thus, we see a symbolic connection between the black tide, the blood tide, and the Ironborn themselves.  The Ironborn themselves were like black waves in the night whose tide was equivalent to blood.  We saw in Melisandre’s vision that the black and bloody tide rises from the depths, and the Ironborn say that they came from the sea – that all lines up. The Ironborn seem to have brought the fire of the sea dragon with them, which we’ve taken as an allusion to the black bloodstone meteorites and the black soul drinking weapons hypothetically made from their ore.  This brings us back to Ned’s sword, which brings together the symbolism of Lightbringer AND the black and bloody tides.  This is Tyrion, getting his first look at Widow’s Wail and Oathkeeper, the swords which drink the sunlight.  I’ve underlined all the watery terminology: The light streaming through the diamond- shaped panes of glass made the blade shimmer black and red as Lord Tywin turned it to inspect the edge, while the pommel and crossguard flamed gold. “With this fool’s jabber of Stannis and his magic sword, it seemed to me that we had best give Joffrey something extraordinary as well. A king should bear a kingly weapon.”  “That’s much too much sword for Joff,” Tyrion said.  “He will grow into it. Here, feel the weight of it.” The sword was much lighter than he had expected. As he turned it in his hand he saw why. Only one metal could be beaten so thin and still have strength enough to fight with, and there was no mistaking those ripples, the mark of steel that has been folded back on itself many thousands of times. “Valyrian steel?” “Yes,” Lord Tywin said, in a tone of deep satisfaction.  {…} Tyrion wondered where the metal for this one had come from. A few master armorers could rework old Valyrian steel, but the secrets of its making had been lost when the Doom came to old Valyria. “The colors are strange,” he commented as he turned the blade in the sunlight. Most Valyrian steel was a grey so dark it looked almost black, as was true here as well. But blended into the folds was a red as deep as the grey. The two colors lapped over one another without ever touching, each ripple distinct, like waves of night and blood upon some steely shore…  {…} Tyrion put down Joffrey’s sword and took up the other. If not twins, the two were at least close cousins. This one was thicker and heavier, a half- inch wider and three inches longer, but they shared the same fine clean lines and the same distinctive color, the ripples of blood and night.  (ASOS, Tyrion) When I first began ruminating on this passage, which certainly stands out in the text, I wondered why there was so much watery language used to describe this sword.  Of course with everything we think we’ve learned at this point, it makes perfect sense.  Lightbringer the flaming meteor sword was the falling sea dragon, and it speaks in a language of the black and bloody tide – waves of night and blood, crashing upon a steely shore. Actual, Non-symbolic Floods and Durran Godsgrief Let’s take a break from all the metaphor for just a second and address the actual, physical component of the flood. I think there are two records of tsunamis brought on my moon meteors: the Ironborn mythology, of course, and the story of Durran Godsgrief. The first reference to the flood in Ironborn lore is in our introduction to Pyke as a broken sword of land, shattered by hammering waves, as we quoted above, and similar references to the Iron Islands.  The second is their reverence for drowned things – gods, prophets, men, etc.  The third would be this, the sad end of the Grey King story, recalled for us by the Damphair: “Gone, all the glory gone . Men were smaller now. Their lives had grown short. The Storm God drowned Nagga’s fire after the Grey King’s death, the chairs and tapestries had been stolen, the roof and walls had rotted away. Even the Grey King’s great throne of fangs had been swallowed by the sea. Only Nagga’s bones endured to remind the ironborn of all the wonder that had been.  (AFFC, The Drowned Man) Admittedly, there’s a chronology issue here: the flood should come with the Grey King’s rise to power, when he slew the sea dragon and summoned the Storm God’s thunderbolt, and instead it comes at his death in this quote.  I do think they may be an explanation for this, having to do with my notion that the story of the “Grey King” is actually a composite of more than one person’s story.  As we uncover more detail, perhaps we’ll begin to be able to sort out some of the chronology here.  What I am focusing on for now are the references to a flood in their ancient myth. As for Durran Godsgrief, we don’t have to do an in-depth analysis of the legend to see how it fits in.  Instead, we’ll do a medium-depth analysis.  😉  It’s the story of a king who pulls down a goddess from heaven – fair Elenei, the daughter of the sea god and wind goddess, and causes a storm so devastating it is remembered 8,000 years later.  This is the same story we have been seeing from the beginning – it’s the Azor Ahai story.  Azor Ahai simultaneously loved and killed a moon goddess, pulling her down from heaven and causing a great storm.  The Grey King did the exact same thing, calling down the lightning / slaying the sea dragon, then possessing her fire and taking a mermaid to wife. We’ve discussed the mermaid wife only briefly, but given that we know the sea dragon is a “drowned goddess,” taking a mermaid to wife completes the symbolic picture – the Grey King both loved and slew his moon goddess wife.  There are a couple more instances of this story in A Song of Ice and Fire mythology – see if you can find them before I put them in an essay! Here is the story of Durran Godsgrief, from the inner monologue of Catleyn in A Clash of Kings: The songs said that Storm’s End had been raised in ancient days by Durran, the first Storm King, who had won the love of the fair Elenei, daughter of the sea god and the goddess of the wind. On the night of their wedding, Elenei had yielded her maidenhood to a mortal’s love and thus doomed herself to a mortal’s death, and her grieving parents had unleashed their wrath and sent the winds and waters to batter down Durran’s hold. His friends and brothers and wedding guests were crushed beneath collapsing walls or blown out to sea, but Elenei sheltered Durran within her arms so he took no harm, and when the dawn came at last he declared war upon the gods and vowed to rebuild. Five more castles he built, each larger and stronger than the last, only to see them smashed asunder when the gale winds came howling up Shipbreaker Bay, driving great walls of water before them. His lords pleaded with him to build inland; his priests told him he must placate the gods by giving Elenei back to the sea; even his smallfolk begged him to relent. Durran would have none of it. A seventh castle he raised, most massive of all. Some said the children of the forest helped him build it, shaping the stones with magic; others claimed that a small boy told him what he must do, a boy who would grow to be Bran the Builder. No matter how the tale was told, the end was the same. Though the angry gods threw storm after storm against it, the seventh castle stood defiant, and Durran Godsgrief and fair Elenei dwelt there together until the end of their days. Gods do not forget, and still the gales came raging up the narrow sea. (ACOK, Catelyn) This story has many storms, not one, but the first one does stand out – it killed everyone and destroyed everything, save for Durran himself who was sheltered by Elenei.  This storm immediately follows Durran’s taking Elenei from the gods, coming at the very wedding, so that’s even the right time for the big storm. The other big takeaway here is that the storms began when Durran stole the daughter of the gods and continue to this day.  This part of the story I think is accurate in a very literal sense.  As I have said, I believe there is evidence to suggest that the Hammer of the Waters was in fact a moon meteor.  This means that prior to the moon’s destruction, the Arm of Dorne was not broken, the Narrow Sea and Summer Sea would not have been connected, and the ocean currents and weather patterns would have been completely different.  Storm’s End would have been at the very southern portion of the Shivering Sea. Translating the myth-speak here, this is the picture I am seeing.  When the moon meteor hit and the earthquakes shattered the land bridge, a horrendous tsunami would surely have raged up the Narrow Sea – this would be the great storm at Durran and Elenei’s wedding which killed everyone.  Ever since, storms have raged in the Narrow Sea, and the builders of castles at Storm’s End had to erect a uniquely fearsome stronghold to withstand them, probably using magic in some fashion to do so. You’ll notice the similarity between Elenei sheltering Durran from the Storm and the Grey King making a long hall (a form of shelter) from the bones of the sea dragon, Nagga. The World of Ice and Fire provides us with a couple of more details about Durran Godsgrief which draw further comparisons to the Grey King – turns out Durran Godsgrief lived for a thousand years too!  This is actually not as common as you might think – although there are a few stories of long life spans, this particular claim of a thousand years is made about Durran, the Grey King, and the God Emperor of the Great Empire of the Dawn… and that’s it. Finally, we are told that Durran Godsgrief took the Rainwood from the children of the forest, which means he warred upon them (it should be noted, however, that his son supposedly gave the Rainwood back to the children).  As we will see in the upcoming essay concerning the burning trees and “bones” of the sea dragon on Nagga’s Hill, the Grey King also seems to have warred on the children in the form of cutting down, killing, and burning weirwood trees. We’ll come back to Storm’s End in future essays, but for now, we can see that the story of Durran Godsgrief and Elenei seems to be talking about the same series of events – the pulling down of a moon goddess which resulted in a quite literal flood. And now, we return to the dark tide of symbol and metaphor, or the metaphorical symbol of the dark tide… whichever you prefer. Where Did the Tide Come From? If the black tide can symbolize Ironborn themselves, what does that mean for the the “waves of blood and night” flood which occurred at the fall of the Long Night?  Was that also referring to an ironborn invasion of some kind?  Well, given that we are examining the possibility that Azor Ahai / the Bloodstone Emperor did invade the west coast of Westeros, this would be another piece of evidence in favor of that hypothesis.  It’s very possible that one aspect of the black and bloody tide which came during the Long Night is a literal invasion of sea-faring people.  In fact, these may have been the original pirates with black weapons. It’s worth noting that the Isle of Ravens, the oldest part of the Citadel in Oldtown, contains a castle which was supposedly once the stronghold of a pirate lord.  Combined with the other clues about a Dawn Age dragon presence at Oldtown, this is tantalizing indeed. Returning to the Wayward Bride chapter for a bit I didn’t include above, we find a couple more clues about drowned goddesses becoming pirates: “What’s here that you should hold so tight to it but pine and mud and foes? We have our ships. Sail away with me, and we’ll make new lives upon the sea.” “As pirates?” It was almost tempting. Let the wolves have back their gloomy woods and retake the open sea. “As traders,” he insisted. “We’ll voyage east as the Crow’s Eye did, but we’ll come back with silks and spices instead of a dragon’s horn. One voyage to the Jade Sea and we’ll be as rich as gods. We can have a manse in Oldtown or one of the Free Cities.”  (ADWD, The Wayward Bride) The idea of becoming pirates is combined with the notion of and sailing back from the former territory of the Great Empire of the Dawn, having become like gods – this really puts us in mind of the Bloodstone Emperor at this point.  A dragon horn is mentioned, as well as Oldtown again, suggesting the pirate lord from the Isle of Ravens in Oldtown.  In addition, one of the rumors about the ancient mariners who came to Whispering Sound before Oldtown was built, the ones who would have built the fused stone fortress there, is that they were traders, come to trade with the children of the forest.  I mention that here because we see the idea of becoming traders juxtaposed with that of becoming pirates. “I have hostages, on Harlaw,” she reminded him. “And there is still Sea Dragon Point … if I cannot have my father’s kingdom, why not make one of my own?” Sea Dragon Point had not always been as thinly peopled as it was now. Old ruins could still be found amongst its hills and bogs, the remains of ancient strongholds of the First Men. In the high places, there were weirwood circles left by the children of the forest. I do not plan on planting wheat or corn. “What’s there? I’ll tell you. Two long coastlines, a hundred hidden coves, otters in the lakes, salmon in the rivers, clams along the shore, colonies of seals offshore, tall pines for building ships.”  (AFFC, The Wayward Bride) Note the trees = ships = sea dragon symbolism raising its ugly head again: the tall pines of sea dragon point can be used to make ships.  We’ve seen that with the skeletons of the burned ships at Lordsport being like dead leviathans, and in the passage with Dany watching her dragons plunge into the sea on the deck of her dragon-named ships.  The relevant idea here for our ‘sea raiders from Asshai’ scenario is that Asha represents these ancient pirates, and she thinks of making a kingdom of her own on a point of land associated with sea dragons and weirwood circles.  Is this perhaps what the first pirate lord from Asshai did at the Iron Islands? If you think about it, it’s likely that the original inhabitants of the Iron Islands were weirwood-tree-worshipping First Men, just as with was the case with the rest of population of Westeros.  This is even more likely if the Iron Islands archipelago used to be connected to the mainland.  We haven’t gotten into the subject of “Nagga’s ribs” just yet (it’s coming), but I definitely agree with most people that those ribs are actually petrified weirwood tree trunks.  The fact that they are planted in a huge circle on top of a hill certainly indicates the presence of children of the forest at some point in the past, if not weirwood-worshipping First Men. If there was an invasion of sea-faring peoples that came to the Iron Islands with black swords in hand, then the current Ironborn culture would be an amalgam of pre- invader and post-invader culture, with the sea-raider culture being predominate and only the traces of a weirwood-worshipping First Man culture remaining… and this is exactly what I will be suggesting in the a future essay. Seek the hill of Nagga and the bones of the Grey King’s Hall, for in that holy place when the moon has drowned and come again we shall make ourselves a worthy king, a godly king.” He raised his bony hands on high again. “ Listen! Listen to the waves! Listen to the god! He is speaking to us, and he says, We shall have no king but from the kings moot!  (AFFC, The Drowned Man) When the moon drowns and comes again, then and only then will a worthy king will be made.  The Grey King, of course, came to power with the drowning of the sea dragon / moon goddess.  This would also fit the scenario of a pirate king invading the Iron Islands at the time of the moon’s drowning – the fall of the Long Night. This is a particularly nice quote because the moon’s drowning and resurrection is essentially the story of the sea dragon and the Ironborn – the sea dragon is drowned, but the Ironborn, led by the Grey King, emerge from the sea with its fire in hand.  If that fire is referring to the soul-drinking black iron weapons made from the moon meteorites, then this really sounds a lot like an invasion of sea-faring peoples with black weapons at the time of the Long Night.  It would be a human personification of the waves of blood and night, just as we saw with the Ironborn’s attack at Winterfell. In other words, I am hypothesizing that if there was a literal invasion of sea raiders to accompany the black tide, it came from Asshai with the Bloodstone Emperor’s invasion. I’m sorely tempted to crack open my glass jar of pickled Deep Ones, but it’s just wrapped in too much tinfoil.  There are enough fishy people with webbed hands and such lurking around the margins of Planetos to suspect that the Deep Ones are real and did make hybrids with humans somehow… but that’s just beyond the scope of this essay.  It’s possible they came with the black tide as well – feel free to cobble up lurid fantasies of Azor Ahai’s army of Deep Ones if you wish, but that’s just a little too far out on the limb for me at this point.  I’m hoping Cotter Pyke’s reference to “dead things in the water” means that we’ll get some glimpse of whatever the merlings / selkies / Deep Ones are in The Winds of Winter, and at that point maybe we can put together the various merling and selkie legends to figure out what’s going on with them.  But for now… yeah.  Ten foot pole. (You need a ten foot pole because those squishers have long, tentacle-like arms…) As for the metaphorical black tide (that’s the one we like 😉 ), where did it come from?  I’ll close with the full text of Melisandre’s “black and bloody tide” visions which I pulled from earlier.  All of these quotes are from the same chapter: Visions danced before her, gold and scarlet, flickering, forming and melting and dissolving into one another, shapes strange and terrifying and seductive. She saw the eyeless faces again, staring out at her from sockets weeping blood. Then the towers by the sea, crumbling as the dark tide came sweeping over them, rising from the depths.  Shadows in the shape of skulls, skulls that turned to mist, bodies locked together in lust, writhing and rolling and clawing.  Through curtains of fire great winged shadows wheeled against a hard blue sky.  {…} A wooden face, corpse white. Was this the enemy? A thousand red eyes floated in the rising flames.  He sees me. Beside him, a boy with a wolf’s face threw back his head and howled.  The red priestess shuddered.  Blood trickled down her thigh, black and smoking.  The fire was inside her, an agony, an ecstasy, filling her, searing her, transforming her. Shimmers of heat traced patterns on her skin, insistent as a lover’s hand.  {…} The spears were eight feet long and made of ash. The one on the left had a slight crook, but the other two were smooth and straight. At the top of each was impaled a severed head. Their beards were full of ice, and the falling snow had given them white hoods. Where their eyes had been, only empty sockets remained, black and bloody holes that stared down in silent accusation.  {…} “We’ve had a raven from Ser Denys Mallister at the Shadow Tower,” Jon Snow told her. “His men have seen fires in the mountains on the far side of the Gorge. Wildlings massing, Ser Denys believes. He thinks they are going to try to force the Bridge of Skulls again.” “Some may.”  Could the skulls in her vision have signified this bridge?  Somehow Melisandre did not think so.  “If it comes, that attack will be no more than a diversion.  I saw towers by the sea, submerged beneath a black and bloody tide.  That is where the heaviest blow will fall.” “Eastwatch?”  Was it?  Melisandre had seen Eastwatch- by- the- Sea with King Stannis. That was where His Grace left Queen Selyse and their daughter Shireen when he assembled his knights for the march to Castle Black.  The towers in her fire had been different, but that was oft the way with visions.  “Yes.  Eastwatch, my lord.” “When?” She spread her hands.  “On the morrow.  In a moon’s turn.  (ADWD, Melisandre) First off, let’s just mention the obvious Lightbringer / comet references here: a thousand red eyes (meteor shower) fire in the mountains (the red fallen star fire Jon saw in the mountain pass) spears with skulls atop them (comet or meteor) great winged shadows (Drogon, the “winged shadow,” moon eclipses), fire searing and transforming and bringing forth black blood (transformation of red to black blood when “the fire is inside” someone, or some moon) in a moon’s turn (the moon triggers the black and bloody tide, heliotrope means “sun, to turn”) an agony, an ecstasy, “shuddering” (Nissa Nissa’s cry of anguish and ecstasy which cracked the moon) The black and bloody tide rises from the depths, but it also comes from the moon, and from empty eye sockets.   How can all these ideas coexist?  We’ve already seen how the first two ideas coexist – the bloody and fiery moon meteors plunged into the bowels of the ocean and triggered the angry, hammering waves of the black and bloody tide.  But can the moon be an empty eye socket?  And if so, who’s eye is that? There’s really only one possibility: God’s Eye. continue to Part 6: A Thousand Eyes and One Hammer