I just love the fact that Martin has put so much thought into magic and try to have it make sense in some way. Normally it's just someone waving a wand saying something like abracadabra because they are born magical. In ice and fire it's something anyone can essentially learn to do cause he brought magic down to earth.
This is the difference between "hard" and "soft" magic systems. GRRM's isn't anywhere near the hardest, where there are explicit rules for how magic works, but it isn't nearly as soft as some, as in LoTR. I like the balance, because I feel there should be quite a bit ot of mystery in magic or it is just science in an alternate universe.
@@inthefade Well in Lotr there's no explaining anything. There's a species of wizard who for some unexplained reason are magical. Here it's very earth bound. There is rules to how magic work. Basically anyone can learn how to do magic, they just need to figure out how.
@@inthefadeLotr isn't a soft system, if you think so then its a skill issue. The problem is most moderns cant interpret a theological basis for reality because of being raised in a secular positivist-materialist worldview.
I agree / like most of what you said. I don't like the fact that all of the magic is a corruption of green magic. The fact that there are similarities can be due to convergent evolution, not by all the magics being the same type of magic. Also, I don't think green magic is that Potent. It's more of an enhancement magic - it doesn't create from nothing, just gives a boost to something already there. Either way, cool video!
I absolutely love your takes on magic and I'm happy to have found your channel! The green hand/red hand is so obvious once it's pointed out, it's ridiculous
I would say that only life can pay for life. Blood is life, man's "seed" would be too. Even fruits are life, but of a lesser qty/quality than blood (That is why people offer fruits to some gods, and why we have stories as Cain/Abel)
@@Loreweavver Thats a lump of coal for you for christmas. 🙂I think in a metaphysical sense its not the carbon thats important, its the lifeforce (abbility to create or at least maintain life).
@@IagoDeVille I mean. You can believe a fire is the spiritual essence of a tree but it isn't. It's the chemical combustion relationship of the carbon molecules.
Great video as per usual! As for the question asked at the end, three branches which are all separate yet the same reminds me of the Holy Trinity. I’m not very religious myself, but that’s just what comes to mind. Not 100% sure how you would relate that to the rest of your theory though. Also, I really like you pointing out the connection between Norse mythology’s idea of the world tree pulling life energy from an icy realm of the dead to the ASoIaF idea of “only death can pay for life.” That’s super cool!
To the question you posed at the end, the first thing that popped into my head was the Trinity, maybe 🤷🏼♂️ Green magic - the creator god Blood magic - Jesus Shadow magic - the holy spirit The connections are all pretty self-explanatory but just to spell it out, the first one because in abrahamic mythology Yhwh is the creator of everything & like you pointed out green magic seems to be the creation of new life The second one because the crucifixion was basically an elaborate blood magic ritual. (Only death can pay for life) And the third because both basically act like ghostly extensions of the caster & the creator god respectively. Whose sole purpose seems to be preforming a certain task (that oddly usually involves getting a woman pregnant, lol) But like I said, that was just the first thing that popped into my head so I could be completely wrong 😅 Either way, I look forward to seeing where you're going with this. And overall I've really been enjoying your fresh takes on the series! Great work as always : )
@@durrangodsgrief6503 They're definitely all related, and I had always assumed they were all just taping into the same magic source by different means. So ya, I could definitely see that
Heard her quote again the other day about when drogo would be as he was before..when the seas dry up, when the sun rises in the west and sets east, when the mountains blow like leaves on the wind..came to the sad realization that that was grrm tellingbus when wed see the end of the story..
Martin likes to plant little echoes of ideas early on so that events later seem more plausible and consistent. I've always agreed that the shade of the evening trees seemed like corrupted weirwoods but it would make a lot of sense for both of them to be corruptions of true green magic. Garth the green could have been an actual tree whose lineage flourished and even brought life to dying forests. Maybe the roots families trace back to him are actual roots.
The Tao and brahman also come to mind. Plus you have to believe in magic for it to work which is similar to faith. "Power resides where men believe it resides."
I agree with this idea. It's actually a piece of my own theory about magic, but explained much better than I ever had. That said, I don't see ASoIaF magic as natural. Some green magic might be, but humans have a tendency to exploit what is natural to exhaustion, and I believe that is where the Bloodstone Emperor came in. I believe he was the first person to realize that the natural magics of green magic could be harnessed through focused mass murder. Before that, people were just as brutal and cruel, but they didn't use the deaths they caused for magic. They just went to war or killed rivals for ordinary ends, such as how the Lannisters use violence to achieve worldly power and maintain their standing. The Lannisters don't do magic rituals, yet their killing maintains their power just the same. However, the Bloodstone Emperor concluded that he could gain even more power by learning to control death and utilize it. He also taught others, his blood mages, to do the same and they went about mucking with nature and killing by the tens or hundreds of thousands. This mass perversion of green magic was on such a scale that it destabilized the seasons and caused the Long Night on Planetos. In short, I believe most of the magic in ASoIaF is an allegory for war, the purposeful destruction of life for the gains of a few at a cost borne by many. GRRM's favorite theme in his writing.
The Massey sigil is very interesting, in light of your video. In the Theon I chapter of WoW, it is described as "the triple spiral, an ancient sigil for an ancient House." The spirals being green, red, and blue. The spiral pattern is reminiscent of the designs of the others. Even the color layout parallels the magics you describe, with green on top. It speaks of something old and forgotten. The three color pattern is used in at least one other obvious example, the three forks of the trident.
I have heard you relate this power system to modern RL power generation, . To lean on that, what if blood magic is very strong, like nuclear power, while green magic is like solar power or wind turbines, which if one is honest, are forms that can't generate huge amounts are power. The follow-up is that the Children resorted to blood magic in the war against the First Men because they needed something strong enough to be nuclear bombs. They turned out the first Others with such high-powered magic, but when the Others became too much of a problem that it drove them to ally with Men, they had to use more nuclear power to run the Wall. Thus, the whole system needs to be torn down and replaced, including ending the Others, and the New World Tree is just going to have to be one that runs on the low capacity power of pure green magic.
I think it's even more scientific than that. Life::carbon. I've mentioned before that I think the black stone/blood are essentially nanomachines from space but knowing that spoils it. It's not something we are supposed to know. ASoIaF is a continuation of Conan and the hyperborean age somewhere between that age and the historical age we know. Edit: have you read At the Mountains of Madness?
It’s a reach, but I wonder if the changing between the green magic to blood magic with the weirwoods, was the doom. Maybe the Valyrian speculated they could have more power with this magic base, but didn’t fully understand the give and take of magic totally; then poof.
Secondary comment: i assume you're thinking trinity by the guessing game. Thats more interesting than you may realize. Look up the son of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra.
i think a better division would be nature/natural magic- green/earth/fire ect verses unnatural/corrupted magic- undead, shadow binding, death in the sense of stopping or keeping on the brink of death
I agree. I think the natural "magic" is water, earth, fire and air that gives life and allows survival. These were corrupted through human sacrifice (blood magic) into destructive types of magic in the form of shadow magic in the case of fire and air (the east and Valyria) and into ice magic in the case of earth and water (Westeros and the North).
I'm no theoretical physicist, but from what I've picked up (I pay attention to a lot of this stuff) so far we've been unable to prove that negative energy exists. It is required in some theoretical cases (Alcubierre warp drives and such) but we've not been able to prove it exists yet. Negative mass, on the other hand, does exist and can nullify normal mass. It's been shown to exist as a result of particle collisions (LHC) but only for fractions of seconds where two particles emerge from nowhere, separate, and then reform to annihilate each other. The distribution of normal and negative mass is not anywhere close to equal. If it were, we would not be here, our planet wouldn't be here, our sun wouldn't be here, nothing that emits or reflects light would be here. For some reason unknown to science there is a severe inequality of normal mass and negative mass in our universe. This is known and accepted but no one quite has an explanation as to why it isn't equal. So while the "death pays for life" trope sounds good in a fictional story, it doesn't quite hold true to the real world. Which is okay. It's fiction. It isn't supposed to be real world. Besides, GRRM is a gardener, not an astrophysicist.
So we've got earth or green magic as the basis of magic in planetos, with Ice, Fire and Water as the main elemental magics. Interesting how this lines up with Bran, Jon, Dany and Aegon. The latter is tied to the Rhoynar water magic through his mother and fathers Dornish heritage, Dany has her dragons, Jon is tied to the starks via Lyanna and will likely be warging his own wighted body by ADOS, and then there's Bran the future Summer King. Three dragons to unite Westeros against the Others ala Aragorn at the Black Gate, while Bran tries to bring an end to the crisis by negotiating with the spirits of the Others.
All magic came from a disruption of the natural, magical, song of ice and fire. I believe that if the magic being channelled by the dragons and icewalkers from the earth would STOP, Planetos would heal itself ecologically at least. Bran should shut the magic down.
I just love the fact that Martin has put so much thought into magic and try to have it make sense in some way. Normally it's just someone waving a wand saying something like abracadabra because they are born magical. In ice and fire it's something anyone can essentially learn to do cause he brought magic down to earth.
This is the difference between "hard" and "soft" magic systems. GRRM's isn't anywhere near the hardest, where there are explicit rules for how magic works, but it isn't nearly as soft as some, as in LoTR. I like the balance, because I feel there should be quite a bit ot of mystery in magic or it is just science in an alternate universe.
@@inthefade Well in Lotr there's no explaining anything. There's a species of wizard who for some unexplained reason are magical. Here it's very earth bound. There is rules to how magic work. Basically anyone can learn how to do magic, they just need to figure out how.
@@basquat76you didn't read LOTR did you?
@@inthefadeI too saw the GRRM interview where he said this
@@inthefadeLotr isn't a soft system, if you think so then its a skill issue.
The problem is most moderns cant interpret a theological basis for reality because of being raised in a secular positivist-materialist worldview.
Holy trinity but also the trident, red fork, represents fire, blue fork for ice, and green fork for green magic
I agree / like most of what you said. I don't like the fact that all of the magic is a corruption of green magic. The fact that there are similarities can be due to convergent evolution, not by all the magics being the same type of magic. Also, I don't think green magic is that Potent. It's more of an enhancement magic - it doesn't create from nothing, just gives a boost to something already there. Either way, cool video!
Oooh on the subject of green-leafed weirwoods, there's that page in the latest ASOIAF calendar that has a face tree with grey bark and green leaves.
I absolutely love your takes on magic and I'm happy to have found your channel! The green hand/red hand is so obvious once it's pointed out, it's ridiculous
Every time I think I have come up with a friggin original theory i come across one of your videos and you have gotten there already!
I love your highly advanced graphics.
Thanks for your content
Yes it's great! Thank you for the uploads ❤
I would say that only life can pay for life. Blood is life, man's "seed" would be too. Even fruits are life, but of a lesser qty/quality than blood (That is why people offer fruits to some gods, and why we have stories as Cain/Abel)
All lives matter even fruit. Sry couldn't resist... 😅
I'm going to simplify it even more. Life is anything with carbon as far as "currency" is concerned.
@@Loreweavver Thats a lump of coal for you for christmas. 🙂I think in a metaphysical sense its not the carbon thats important, its the lifeforce (abbility to create or at least maintain life).
@@IagoDeVille I mean. You can believe a fire is the spiritual essence of a tree but it isn't.
It's the chemical combustion relationship of the carbon molecules.
Very happy to see this, as always thanks!
Great video as per usual! As for the question asked at the end, three branches which are all separate yet the same reminds me of the Holy Trinity. I’m not very religious myself, but that’s just what comes to mind. Not 100% sure how you would relate that to the rest of your theory though.
Also, I really like you pointing out the connection between Norse mythology’s idea of the world tree pulling life energy from an icy realm of the dead to the ASoIaF idea of “only death can pay for life.” That’s super cool!
To the question you posed at the end, the first thing that popped into my head was the Trinity, maybe 🤷🏼♂️
Green magic - the creator god
Blood magic - Jesus
Shadow magic - the holy spirit
The connections are all pretty self-explanatory but just to spell it out, the first one because in abrahamic mythology Yhwh is the creator of everything & like you pointed out green magic seems to be the creation of new life
The second one because the crucifixion was basically an elaborate blood magic ritual. (Only death can pay for life)
And the third because both basically act like ghostly extensions of the caster & the creator god respectively. Whose sole purpose seems to be preforming a certain task (that oddly usually involves getting a woman pregnant, lol)
But like I said, that was just the first thing that popped into my head so I could be completely wrong 😅
Either way, I look forward to seeing where you're going with this. And overall I've really been enjoying your fresh takes on the series! Great work as always : )
except Jesus is also the creator and the Holy Spirit so it would just be green magic and a distinction in uses than branching off
@@durrangodsgrief6503 They're definitely all related, and I had always assumed they were all just taping into the same magic source by different means. So ya, I could definitely see that
Can't wait for you to pick apart the drowned gods.. Quality vid as always...
Heard her quote again the other day about when drogo would be as he was before..when the seas dry up, when the sun rises in the west and sets east, when the mountains blow like leaves on the wind..came to the sad realization that that was grrm tellingbus when wed see the end of the story..
Martin likes to plant little echoes of ideas early on so that events later seem more plausible and consistent. I've always agreed that the shade of the evening trees seemed like corrupted weirwoods but it would make a lot of sense for both of them to be corruptions of true green magic. Garth the green could have been an actual tree whose lineage flourished and even brought life to dying forests. Maybe the roots families trace back to him are actual roots.
Aahh im excited for the next episode
The Tao and brahman also come to mind. Plus you have to believe in magic for it to work which is similar to faith. "Power resides where men believe it resides."
The trinity?
I agree with this idea. It's actually a piece of my own theory about magic, but explained much better than I ever had.
That said, I don't see ASoIaF magic as natural. Some green magic might be, but humans have a tendency to exploit what is natural to exhaustion, and I believe that is where the Bloodstone Emperor came in. I believe he was the first person to realize that the natural magics of green magic could be harnessed through focused mass murder. Before that, people were just as brutal and cruel, but they didn't use the deaths they caused for magic. They just went to war or killed rivals for ordinary ends, such as how the Lannisters use violence to achieve worldly power and maintain their standing. The Lannisters don't do magic rituals, yet their killing maintains their power just the same. However, the Bloodstone Emperor concluded that he could gain even more power by learning to control death and utilize it. He also taught others, his blood mages, to do the same and they went about mucking with nature and killing by the tens or hundreds of thousands. This mass perversion of green magic was on such a scale that it destabilized the seasons and caused the Long Night on Planetos. In short, I believe most of the magic in ASoIaF is an allegory for war, the purposeful destruction of life for the gains of a few at a cost borne by many. GRRM's favorite theme in his writing.
The Massey sigil is very interesting, in light of your video. In the Theon I chapter of WoW, it is described as "the triple spiral, an ancient sigil for an ancient House." The spirals being green, red, and blue. The spiral pattern is reminiscent of the designs of the others. Even the color layout parallels the magics you describe, with green on top. It speaks of something old and forgotten. The three color pattern is used in at least one other obvious example, the three forks of the trident.
That is a good catch. It certainly could be a little hint there. GRRM loves doing little things like that
I have heard you relate this power system to modern RL power generation, . To lean on that, what if blood magic is very strong, like nuclear power, while green magic is like solar power or wind turbines, which if one is honest, are forms that can't generate huge amounts are power. The follow-up is that the Children resorted to blood magic in the war against the First Men because they needed something strong enough to be nuclear bombs. They turned out the first Others with such high-powered magic, but when the Others became too much of a problem that it drove them to ally with Men, they had to use more nuclear power to run the Wall. Thus, the whole system needs to be torn down and replaced, including ending the Others, and the New World Tree is just going to have to be one that runs on the low capacity power of pure green magic.
I think it's even more scientific than that. Life::carbon.
I've mentioned before that I think the black stone/blood are essentially nanomachines from space but knowing that spoils it. It's not something we are supposed to know.
ASoIaF is a continuation of Conan and the hyperborean age somewhere between that age and the historical age we know.
Edit: have you read At the Mountains of Madness?
As they say… all magic comes with a price.
George is a lapsed Catholic, so he probably has some thoughts on the subject. Water, blood, multiple aspects of one.
It’s a reach, but I wonder if the changing between the green magic to blood magic with the weirwoods, was the doom. Maybe the Valyrian speculated they could have more power with this magic base, but didn’t fully understand the give and take of magic totally; then poof.
So what would happen if they burn the heart tree at winterfell?
Secondary comment: i assume you're thinking trinity by the guessing game.
Thats more interesting than you may realize. Look up the son of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra.
black and green factions = life and shadow factions?
Green, the father. Blood, the son. Shadow, the Holy Spirit/ghost.
i think a better division would be nature/natural magic- green/earth/fire ect verses unnatural/corrupted magic- undead, shadow binding, death in the sense of stopping or keeping on the brink of death
I agree. I think the natural "magic" is water, earth, fire and air that gives life and allows survival. These were corrupted through human sacrifice (blood magic) into destructive types of magic in the form of shadow magic in the case of fire and air (the east and Valyria) and into ice magic in the case of earth and water (Westeros and the North).
Looks like a traffic light, Green, Yellow(shadow) and, Red
I'm no theoretical physicist, but from what I've picked up (I pay attention to a lot of this stuff) so far we've been unable to prove that negative energy exists. It is required in some theoretical cases (Alcubierre warp drives and such) but we've not been able to prove it exists yet.
Negative mass, on the other hand, does exist and can nullify normal mass. It's been shown to exist as a result of particle collisions (LHC) but only for fractions of seconds where two particles emerge from nowhere, separate, and then reform to annihilate each other.
The distribution of normal and negative mass is not anywhere close to equal. If it were, we would not be here, our planet wouldn't be here, our sun wouldn't be here, nothing that emits or reflects light would be here. For some reason unknown to science there is a severe inequality of normal mass and negative mass in our universe. This is known and accepted but no one quite has an explanation as to why it isn't equal.
So while the "death pays for life" trope sounds good in a fictional story, it doesn't quite hold true to the real world. Which is okay. It's fiction. It isn't supposed to be real world.
Besides, GRRM is a gardener, not an astrophysicist.
love ur content . isn't it just sacrificial then not really green magic
I'm laughing trying to imagine Melisandre explaining to the COTF that she uses green magic too, right before they kill her.
So we've got earth or green magic as the basis of magic in planetos, with Ice, Fire and Water as the main elemental magics. Interesting how this lines up with Bran, Jon, Dany and Aegon. The latter is tied to the Rhoynar water magic through his mother and fathers Dornish heritage, Dany has her dragons, Jon is tied to the starks via Lyanna and will likely be warging his own wighted body by ADOS, and then there's Bran the future Summer King. Three dragons to unite Westeros against the Others ala Aragorn at the Black Gate, while Bran tries to bring an end to the crisis by negotiating with the spirits of the Others.
I’m thinking maybe a holy trinity or something?
mass-energy?
😲😲😲😲😲😲💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚
All magic came from a disruption of the natural, magical, song of ice and fire. I believe that if the magic being channelled by the dragons and icewalkers from the earth would STOP, Planetos would heal itself ecologically at least. Bran should shut the magic down.
🎉fna🎉
I mean garth can be serial magical grapist.
The Holy trenedy?
Abrahamics?
Its gotta be Catholicism
Sex is not a magical spell. That is 100% NOT what grrm is going for.
I cast a spell every night
@@goatskin4487 that’s called masturbation
The Trinity?