#the old gods

[thewatcher0nthewall]

"Who are You? "

The Black Gate at Nightfort

[dycefic]

The Hearthstone God

[The sequel to the God of Prophecy, and the Serpent God of Protection]

---

Fire is out of fashion, in this new age.

Some of my kind have found new homes, new names, in factories or forges, in the hearts of wildfires or crystals or volcanoes.

Most of us are simply forgotten.

I was a fire god, once. A god of gathering, a god of communion, a god of song and story. But there are no hearthstones now. No fires around which families gather to eat and talk and tell stories.

I am lucky. I am tied to a great flat stone near a lake. A lake that has survived all the wild exuberance of men, when they learned to change the world around them. Once, this was a place where travellers stopped to rest. At first they travelled on their feet, or on half-wild horses. Then there were carts, and a road. Much later, cars drove down the road. The road was paved.

But some things do not change. People need clean water to drink, and the spring here is good. They need to rest, when they are weary. And even now, when they come to camp in nylon tents, to fish in the lake, or to hunt the ducks, or drive camper-vans to the flat place, their ancient instincts wake, and they turn to fire once more. They light new fires atop my stone, so flat and safe, from which no log will roll to set the woods afire.

Not so many come now. Camping is less popular these days. But some still come. Some still light their fires, and settle around my stone, and talk, or listen to music, or tell stories. So I survive, just barely, on the edges of belief.

I feel it, when things begin to change. Something is happening. Something is drawing old gods back. Not the great ones, risen beyond mortal understanding, but the oldest gods, the small gods, those who rose when humankind were still learning what they were.

Far to the west of me, a god even more ancient than I wakes, and begins to hunt again. I remember the stories that were once told of that old serpent, and tell them over to myself in the long fireless nights.

A god of prophecy, not of this land, settles south and west, and I remember tales of ancient ravens, their wisdom and their guile and their sharp, sharp eyes. There was a raven clan once, who passed this way in the days of skin garments and stone tools, but I have forgotten their name. I only remember the symbol they wore, the black bird with its spread wings, marked in charcoal or charring on wooden talismans or leather garments.

I wait, to see who will awaken next.

To my great surprise, it is me.

The people who come this time aren’t like the campers. They come at night, a ragged family group with few blood ties between them, with a single tent and few possessions carried on devices I haven’t seen before. Bicycles, they’re called, slung over with bags the way ponies used to be. They come at night, and hide when cars pass on the road.

They light a fire on my stone, with wood scavenged from the forest, and huddle around its warmth. They don’t speak much, not at first, but they say enough. They have no home, I learn. They are travellers of a kind I have not known before, who are allowed to stop nowhere, but have no goal but a place to rest. They are thin, and worn, and so tired. So very tired.

They need a hearth.

I am only a weak shadow of a god, now, who once recorded the songs and stories of a thousand generations in my ancient stone, but I am still a god of fire. Their fire burns slow, their little fuel lasting well. The food they heat over it sustains them better. The water of that spring, my spring, puts a little life back in them. This stone has lain in this place since great monsters walked this world, since before humans spoke words to one another, and I came into being with the first fire that burned on it. I am old, old, and though weak, I am not powerless.

They stay.

I cannot speak to them. I am old, and weak, and they do not believe. But slowly, with the power of the fires they build every night, with the tiny offerings of scraps of food spilled into the flames, with their growing confidence in the safety of this place, I am able to do more. I give them dreams and they find the cave not far away, where they can hide. They dream of fish, and begin to try to catch some. A woman remembers that some of the local plants are safe to eat, when I slowly wake a long-forgotten memory of a camping trip from her childhood.

And then a child, a strange, quiet child who rarely speaks, a child without mother or father, in the care of an older brother who is exhausted to the very edge of death but cannot give up while she needs him… that child begins to hear.

She sits on my stone, sometimes for hours, not moving or speaking. It worries the others, but at least she is quiet, at least she is no trouble, and they are beginning to associate their hearth with safety. So they let her sit.

She is *listening*. She is listening to the sound of the water, to the sounds of the forest, to the wind blowing. And because she is listening, where no-one else has listened for so long, I sing to her. I sing to her the songs of thousands of years. From the wordless music of the earliest people, who sang what was in their hearts without words, to the songs I have learned from the fishermen with their radios and bluetooth speakers.

I do not know if she hears me, for some time. But then, one night, while they sit around their fire and eat food the oldest have almost certainly stolen, she sings one of my songs. “In a cavern… on a canyon… excavating for a mine…” she sings in a small voice. The others are startled, confused, for she has not spoken aloud since some bad thing they do not name happened, but one of the older ones knows the song and sings with her.

I have always liked ‘Clementine’. It’s been popular with campers for a long time.

The next day, while she sits on my stone, she sings along to one of the wordless songs the Raven People whose name I no longer remember once sang. It is a lullaby, a soft croon to soothe an infant, passed from mother to mother, and she seems to take pleasure in it.

She can hear me. She can even answer me, as the voice driven away by pain and fear begins to return. And so I grow stronger still. Strong enough to make the raven sign on the stone, one day, in the ashes of the fire of the night before.

She takes a half burned stick, and draws the sign on the stone. Pleased, I show her another sign, a leaping fish. She draws that too.

Soon, I need not shift the ashes. I can show her the pictures in her mind, and she draws them. She draws the wheel of a cart, and into her heart I whisper the stories the travellers in covered wagons once told over my stone. She draws a fish, and I make her laugh silently with the jests of fishermen who boast of fish who escaped them. She draws a horse, and I tell her about the wild horses who once drank at this lake, about the men and women who captured and tamed them and rode them through the forest when it was far greater than it is now. She draws a long-toothed cat, and I show her the great cat that once slept on my stone, and denned in the cave where her new found family sleep.

One night, when all the others are asleep and my fire has burned down to coals, she creeps back to the stone and looks into the coals. “Who are you?” she asks. “Are you real?”

She is afraid that the voice in her mind is the voice of madness, a lie created by a mind that does not work like other minds, that has endured great hardship. I do not want this child to be afraid. To instill fear runs counter to my very nature, save in whoever might threaten those my hearth protects.

I am a god of the hearth. I am a god of food, and communication, and peace, and safety. I am all the things that fire used to mean, before humans learned again to fear the thing they had tamed. I do not often take a form, for fire is my form, but for her I must try.

There was a wise woman once, who knew me, whose clan visited this lake several times every year. I watched her grow up, and grow old. I watched her learn of the god of the fire stone, and I watched her teach others. She slept beside me as a child, and as a woman. She sang her children to sleep beside me, and her grandchildren, and dozed beside me as an old, old woman. To her, I was represented by a sign of a flame in an oval, a fire and a stone.

I build a likeness of her out of the light of the coals and the shadows of smoke, a child with straight dark hair and a simple tunic, and in lines of light I draw the sign of the fire and the stone on the outlined chest. “I am the fire,” I tell her, “and the stone. I am all the fires that have ever burned here, all the stories told, all the songs sung, all the meals eaten. I am the traveler’s hearth, and the rest for the weary, and this is my place.”

“Piedra de fuego,” she says, tracing the symbol with her finger in the air. “The fire stone.”

“Yes. I am the god of this place.”

She frowns at this. “My brother says that God is in the sky.”

“Many gods are in the sky.” I cannot continue to hold the form of the girl, but the coals shift to make my sign. “I am not. I am here. I have always been here, since the first people built a fire on my stone, and warmed themselves.”

She nods slowly. “You are… a small god,” she says thoughtfully. “A place god. Like in movies.”

“Yes.” I’ve heard of movies, which are a new way of telling old, old stories. “Old places, important places, often have gods. And gods who are forgotten return to their old places and wait, until someone believes again.”

“Will you protect us?” she asks. “When the police come, to tell us to move on?”

“I am not strong,” I tell her sadly. “I cannot make men go away from here, if they are dangerous, or even call game here for you as I once did. But what I can do, I will do.”

She sits watching the coals for a long time, thinking. “Can we make you stronger?”

I think too, and she waits patiently. “You have already made me stronger. You listened. You believed. If you can convince the others to believe, that will make me stronger still.”

She sighed. “They don’t believe in anything, anymore. Not good things.”

It is a sad thing, that she knows that. They’ve been trying to hide it from her. “Then,” I tell her, “that means there is a place in their hearts that is ready for me. I am not hope. I am not a happy ending. I am not a god in the sky. I am a stone, and a fire, and a song. I am *real*. They can believe in what is real.”

The next night, she asks for a story, and one of the adults tells her an old fairy-tale from a country far away.

The next night, again, she asks for a story, and another adult tells a funny story about his childhood.

On the third night, she asks her brother to tell her a story. He tries, but he is so tired - not physically, but emotionally - that he runs out of words. So she lays her hand on his arm and offers to tell him a story, instead.

And she tells them all a story about a stone near a lake, flat and strong, that people wearing uncured skins and carrying flint weapons built a fire on. She tells of centuries passing, of people coming to the lake on their feet, on horses, in carts and wagons, in cars and motor-homes. Of thousands of years of fires, of people gathered around them, of the great continuity of humanity, and the Piedra De Fuego that has lain in this place since time began, listening to the stories and the songs and the voices of people long gone. Somewhere in the stone, she says, laying her hand on it, all those stories are remembered. All those songs are still sung. And it will remember us too.

I don’t know if it will work. But I was right. People need to believe in something. They need something to hold onto, when times are hard, when the ties of community and family are broken and they feel alone. And a stone thousands of years old, and a fire endlessly renewed on that stone, always new… that is real. They touch me, and think of those who came before, of thousands of years of history meeting them in this place, and they feel less alone.

It’s not much, not yet. But it is something. My nature, my existence, as explained to them by my small, strange priestess, is a slender lifeline flung to those who are adrift, a tiny certainty in a world they do not trust. And the more they believe in that lifeline, that certainty, then the more they believe in me. I *am* growing stronger.

When the police come, I will not be able to make them leave… but I think I am strong enough now to hide my people from unkind eyes. And if I can do that, then their faith will grow.

Tonight, three more people come. A mother and two children, weary and beaten down with hardship. My people welcome them, give them fish and greens grown by the lake, speak kindly to them. And when they have eaten, my little priestess sits between the two children and tells them a story of a stone, and a fire, and thousands of years of stories and songs, and she sings a wordless lullaby six thousand years forgotten, but living again in a child who draws the sign of the Raven in the dirt while she sings, and the sign of the fire on the stone.

And I grow a little stronger.

[seeker-ophelia]

14 Days Until Veilguard

Technically 13 days, 23 hours and 27 minutes but who's counting...

I AM UNWELL

[death-of-cats]

Arya IX, ACOK

The Turncloak, ADWD

Two prayers.

[trashpandaartblog6000]

'Somewhere in Providence' by Eric Joyner

[pendovah]

He had a weirwood's eyes. Red eyes, red mouth, white fur. Blood and bone, like a heart tree. He belongs to the old gods, this one.

[actiwitch]

pop-culture tags to block as a pagan

(not that anything is inherently wrong with these fandoms!!!! this is just to avoid seeing these fandom's content under searches and tags about your gods if you so choose)

HELLENIC:

#lore olympus / #rachel smyth / #lo / #lo hades / #lo persephone / #lo apollo / #lo artemis / #lo demeter / #hadestown / #hadestown fanart / #hadestown the musical / #the sandman / #the sandman netflix / #dc / #morpheus x reader / #stray gods / #percy jackson / #pjo

NORSE:

#mcu / #marvel / #marvel cinematic universe / #marvel studios / #mcu loki / #loki mcu / #mcu thor / #thor mcu / #loki x reader / #thor x reader / #loki x thor / #thorki / #lokius / #loki series / #tom hiddleston / #god of war / #gow

EGYPTIAN:

#ennead manhwa / #seth ennead / #ennead seth / #ennead fanart / #seven seas entertainment

GENERAL/MISC/OTHER:

#record of ragnarok / #ror / #snv / #shuumatsu no valkyrie / #yaoi / #bl / #boy love

let me know any additions below! this is certainly not comprehensive.

[god-of-annwn]

~ Welsh Mythology - Arawn, King of the Otherworld, God of death

Hir yw'r dydd a hir yw'r nos, a hir yw aros Arawn 

Long is the day and long is the night, and long is the waiting of Arawn

[firefly-collective]

Spoilers for Doctor Who, The Legend of Ruby Sunday!!!!!

Spoiler bar!

Doctor Who theory time! (Or maybe just the crackpot ramblings of a disturbed lunatic)

So in the latest episode, The Legend of Ruby Sunday, we had the character Harriet Arbinger, who, like Henry Arbinger from The Devil's Chord was actually a Harbinger. Only this time, she was the harbinger for Sutekh, The One Who Waits.

As Sutekh was revealing himself, Harriet listed out other deities, Toymaker God of Games, Maestro God of Music, Trickster God of Traps etc etc. But that got me thinking about another person referred to as a god.

The Oncoming Storm, The Predator, The Last of The Time Lords, The Shadow, The Beast, The Valeyard, The Lonely God.

The Doctor

What if The Doctor is either one of The Pantheon or the child of one of The Pantheon?

So what if The Doctor is The God of Life? A God that was sent away from The Pantheon either for his own protection or for being a positive God (since Sutekh only lists chaotic gods)

Being a God of Life would explain his infinite lives/regenerations and being a multiversal being and an Old God that was banished when he was young, would truly make him, The Timeless Child

But because he was sent to Galifrey and joined a race of Time Travellers, he became, a non linear God. And that made him dangerous, even to his fellow gods.

So, The Trickster, God of Traps, made a deal with The Founding Fathers of Galifrey, trapping The Doctor while giving Tecteun the ability to pass on regeneration to her race and people.

Tecteun formed The Division to protect her people from The Pantheon while keeping The Doctor under her observation.

But a side effect of The Doctor being a non linear God, is that unlike Maestro and Sutekh, who have their physical beings as harbingers (Henry and Harriet Arbinger), The Doctor has something else as his.

The TARDIS is The Doctor's harbinger. A living time machine for the God of Life, that's been corrupted by his fellow gods. And I can see two points where the TARDIS is corrupted.

Either since the very beginning, when The Trickster made a deal with Tecteun and corrupted the TARDIS he knew The Doctor would end up with.

Or the one that I think is more likely, where The TARDIS is corrupted by Sutekh in 1911 when he battled The 4th Doctor in The Pyramids of Mars

Tl;dr- I think The Doctor is an old God and the God of Life, Sutekh's antithesis

This has been Ash, singing off- Ash (he/they)

[lady-of-the-spirit]

Ryoko and the Old Gods.

Blasted by Sarah Kane / Intimacy and Midnight All Day: A Novel and Stories by Hanif Kureishi / @/seravph / Elektra by Sophocles, trans. Anne Carson / Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan by Ilya Repin / The Elektra Complex by Joan Tierney / The Great 1x10, ‘The Beaver’s Nose’ / The Last Days of Judas Iscariot by Stephen Adly Guirgis

[thewatcher0nthewall]

Just some pics about the creative process

[coldandconfused]

Hi guys, just wanted to share a shirt I painted (sorry for the shitty quality btw, my camera sucks :,( ).

Rher the trickster moon god.

[illusivesoul]

Urthemiel

[death-of-cats]

Jon II, ACOK

Davos II, ADWD

Bran III, ADWD

A Ghost in Winterfell, ADWD

Theon I, TWOW

Theon as blood sacrifice to the Old Gods.

[iceywolf24]

Bran is a prince of a lost kingdom, and the old gods are linked to rivers.

What was he now? Only Bran the broken boy, Brandon of House Stark, prince of a lost kingdom, lord of a burned castle, heir to ruins

The caves were timeless, vast, silent. They were home to more than three score living singers and the bones of thousands dead, and extended far below the hollow hill. "Men should not go wandering in this place," Leaf warned them. "The river you hear is swift and black, and flows down and down to a sunless sea.

And there was the old first men kingdom kingdom of the riverlands/rivers and hills

"Here lies Tristifer, the Fourth of His Name, King of the Rivers and the Hills." Her father had told her his story once. "He ruled from the Trident to the Neck, thousands of years before Jenny and her prince, in the days when the kingdoms of the First Men were falling one after the other before the onslaught of the Andals. The Hammer of Justice, they called him. He fought a hundred battles and won nine-and-ninety, or so the singers say, and when he raised this castle it was the strongest in Westeros." She put a hand on her son's shoulder. "He died in his hundredth battle, when seven Andal kings joined forces against him. - Catelyn V ASOS

The name Brandon also means hill in some forms.

The trees remember forgotten truths, is this foreshadowing that the riverlands is the first place in the south where Bran brings back old gods magic.

Bran is not Prince of Winterfell, he's alsobthe Heir to the Kingdom of the Rivers and the Hills, Prince of the Trident.

[laurellerual]

in agot arya mentions becoming a high Septon in *that* line, its been a while since I read the books so I don't remember a lot but do you think arya will end up having a big role in any faith (the seven or the old gods)? i can't remember if she thought about religion a lot or not

High septon Arya with some cool high priestess tarot symbolism

Good question. Arya is the only main character to be part of a religious order, and is not clearly falling into the 'chosen one' category. I expect that all the religions and respective magics that she has encountered will play a fundamental role in her future.

I don't see Arya in a role like the High Septon because I don't think she recognizes the Seven as her own gods. I would say that Arya believes in the Old Gods and the Many-Faced God, and that she recognizes the power of R'hllor.

I think that in the future Arya could find herself in the position of 'collaborator/lay member' of the FM order, perhaps fulfilling a similar role as Brusco and Izembaro, but it is only speculation.

Some random thoughts on religion in Arya's storyline not a meta:

Religions are a fairly recurring topic in her chapters, she is probably the character who has encountered most faiths, but her relationship with them is particular. She seems to be quite curious about religion, especially now that she's in Braavos and surrounded by the strangest temples.

One time, the girl remembered, the Sailor's Wife had walked her rounds with her and told her tales of the city's stranger gods. "That is the house of the Great Shepherd. 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. Those are the Stones of the Silent God, and there the entrance to the Patternmaker's Maze. Only those who learn to walk it properly will ever find their way to wisdom, the priests of the Pattern say. 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."

We know that she was raised in a mixed faith family. But while there is a septa to take care of her education I don't think the Stark children were born in the light of the Seven.

Arya never seems to refer to the religion of the Seven as her own. She defines the seven as "the southron god, the one with seven faces". She also never pray to them and she doesn't uses many common language expressions concerning them. But she often notices symbols or expressions related to the Seven that are used by the people around her. For example, in contrast, it's funny how often the Hound says "seven hells" or how often she hears "Mother have mercy".

But this religion can be useful to better understand the character from a thematic point of view, especially in her relationship with her mother. For example, it is interesting to see how Cat, for a moment, sees Arya in the warrior. Or how Arya could end up filling the role of Mercy for Merciless Mother.

This passage where Cat describes the Old gods as faceless particularly interesting in light of Arya's future, but also in light of Cat's future. In fact Lady Stoneheart's face ironically resembles the face of a weirwood.

Catelyn had been anointed with the seven oils and named in the rainbow of light that filled the sept of Riverrun. She was of the Faith, like her father and grandfather and his father of her before him. Her gods had names, and their faces were as familiar as the faces of her parents. Worship was a septon with a censer, the smell of incense, a seven-sided crystal alive with light, voices raised in song. The Tullys kept a godswood, as all the great houses did, but it was only a place to walk or read or lie in the sun. Worship was for the sept. For her sake, Ned had built a small sept where she might sing to the seven faces of god, but the blood of the First Men still flowed in the veins of the Starks, and his own gods were the old ones, the nameless, faceless gods of the greenwood they shared with the vanished children of the forest.

The Old gods have a much more obvious importance for Arya. This is the religion she prays to and the one she is immersed from narrative. Arya sees and crosses some of the most important places of this faith: High heart and the God's eye. The scene in the godswood of Harrenhal is fundamentally related to the theme of identity. I talked more about this here.

But the Old gods haven't an organized faith so I don't think it works to think of it as analogous to the faith of the Seven. I mean that there are no 'roles' to fill here. Bran's storyline could tell us more about this.

When Arya arrives in Braavos she sees a Sept, but she never goes there. Her thoughts go to the fact that this is a city without trees instead.

I think we need to keep an eye on the Many-Faced God and the Old gods because they're the deities that have the most thematic relevance in Arya's story right now. Somehow they represent the crossroads at which she is.

They are not my Seven. They were my mother's gods, and they let the Freys murder her at the Twins. She wondered whether she would find a godswood in Braavos, with a weirwood at its heart. Denyo might know, but she couldn't ask him. Salty was from Saltpans, and what would a girl from Saltpans know about the old gods of the north? The old gods are dead, she told herself, with Mother and Father and Robb and Bran and Rickon, all dead. A long time ago, she remembered her father saying that when the cold winds blow the lone wolf dies and the pack survives. He had it all backwards. Arya, the lone wolf, still lived, but the wolves of the pack had been taken and slain and skinned.

Perhaps when winter comes we will discover that this crossroads is not as marked as it might seem. I'm not the first person here to discuss how similar in their description Bloodraven's Cave and House of Black and White are. In particular there is a visual and thematic parallel in the use of weirwood, in the appearance of Bloodraven and the kindly man and in the type of meat that is served to Arya and Bran.

We must also take into consideration the religion of R'hllor which will become increasingly important in twow. Arya has encountered this before and is familiar with its power to resurrect the dead this way. This will certainly affect her opinion of Lady Stoneheart and Jon Snow. Also we've seen Melisandre's glamors and we know these are listed by the kindly man as one of the methods Arya will need to learn. Even the concept of blood magic seems somewhat akin to the methods of the FMs.

Another religion to keep an eye on for the future is that of the Moonsingers because, as was discussed around here a few days ago, we could see Arya frequent their temple. They are as old as the FM, among the founders of Braavos and seem to deal respectively with life and death.

"The Isle of the Gods is farther on. See? Six bridges down, on the right bank. 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.

This could become relevant in the next book when Arya gets her moonblood.

"It may be that the Many-Faced God has led you here to be His instrument, but when I look at you I see a child . . . and worse, a girl child. Many have served Him of Many Faces through the centuries, but only a few of His servants have been women. Women bring life into the world. We bring the gift of death. No one can do both."

Furthermore, the fact that Moonsinger and Wolf are practically synonymous is certainly... a choice.

"Snow," the moon murmured. The wolf made no answer. Snow crunched beneath his paws. The wind sighed through the trees. Far off, he could hear his packmates calling to him, like to like. They were hunting too. A wild rain lashed down upon his black brother as he tore at the flesh of an enormous goat, washing the blood from his side where the goat's long horn had raked him. In another place, his little sister lifted her head to sing to the moon, and a hundred small gray cousins broke off their hunt to sing with her. The hills were warmer where they were, and full of food. Many a night his sister's pack of him gorged on the flesh of sheep and cows and horses, the prey of men, and sometimes even on the flesh of man himself.