Bleak, windowless and sea- swept, the House of Black and White sits upon the Braavosi Isle of the Gods, offering succor and dreamless finality to any peti- tioners who seek it. Inside, the walls are lined with the figures of exotic gods and goddess, each representing the grim specter of death: the Stranger of the Seven, the Lion of Night, the Hooded Wayfarer, Bakkalon, the Moon- Pale Maiden, the Merling King. And yet, despite hailing from different lands and serving dif- ferent petitioners, to the Faceless Men each of these gods is but an aspect of the
true god: Him of Many Faces, he who grants the gift of death. Devotees may present themselves to the house at any time, and those who drink of the black pool in the center of the temple will find themselves sink into a warm blackness from which they will never awaken, their bodies lying inert in the stone beds that line the walls. Eventually their bodies will be removed by acolytes and sub- ject to various ablutions before they are laid to eternal rest in the sanctum below. Others—those with darker motives perhaps—can approach the temple for another reason: to request the demise of another human being by engaging the services of the Faceless Men. Mute, velveteen and mysterious, the Faceless Men and their services are available to all: regardless of the person who asks, the price that is charged for a person’s demise will be very great indeed, but not beyond their ability to pay.
[The] waif replied. “My mother died when I was little, I have no memory of her. When I was six my father wed again. His new wife treated me kindly until she gave birth to a daughter of her own. Then it was her wish that I should die, so her own blood might inherit my father’s wealth. … When the healers in the House of the Red Hands told my father what she had done, he came here and made sacrifice, offering up all his wealth and me. Him of Many Faces heard his prayer. I was brought to the temple to serve, and my father’s wife received the gift” [FfC 35 Cat of the Canals:
517].
The Faceless Men trace their origins to the Valyrian Freehold, where the worship of the Many- Faced God began as a folk religion practiced by slaves: according to the legend told to Arya in the House of Black and White, the first Faceless Man realized that all of the gods to whom slaves prayed to deliver them from their misery were but aspects of the one, unified deity: Him of Many Faces. Believing himself to be the instrument of this god, the first Faceless Man defied the Valyrians and their dragons and began freeing the slaves from their bondage (FfC 23 Arya 2: 321–22). Not by releasing them into the world—“Revolts were
common in the mines, but few accomplished much”—but by introducing them to the angels who would lead them to the nightlands “where the stars burn ever bright” (FfC 23 Arya 2: 321, 316). But there is more to this story: although at
first simply acting in service to the slaves by relieving them of the burden of liv- ing, it is heavily implied by the Kindly Man that it was in fact the Faceless Men who were eventually responsible for the Doom of Valyria: “[The first Faceless Man] would bring the gift to [the Dragonlords] as well … but that is a tale for another day, one best shared with no one” (FfC 23 Arya 2: 322)—an event
which saw lakes boil away, volcanoes erupt and much of the land collapse into the sea. Most significantly, the Many- Faced God is a syncretistic combination of the deities of other religions, and thus serves as the key to unlocking some of the metaphysical problems inherent to A Song of Ice and Fire. It is quite clear that
the Many- Faced God is understood to be a stand- in for the many gods of death in the various pantheons in Martin’s world, as the Kindly Man tells Arya: “Men of a hundred different nations labored in the mines, and each prayed to his own god in his own tongue, yet all were praying for the same thing. … The slaves were not crying out to a hundred different gods, as it seemed, but to one god with a hundred different faces” (FfC 23 Arya 2: 322).
However, this comment is also to a degree ambiguous: although it is obvi- ous that the hundred different faces of the one god would be at least partially constituted by gods of death such as the Merling King, the Moon- Pale Maiden and the Stranger, it is by no means clear whether those faces are entirely com- prised of gods of death. Complicating things further is the fact that Jaqen H’ghar, despite being a Faceless Man, happily invokes the powers of other gods when engaging in the serious business of swearing his service to Arya, even those who are not deities of death: “By all the gods of sea and air, and even him of fire, I swear it. … By the seven new gods and the old gods beyond count, I swear it” (CoK 48 Arya 9: 514). And, even more curiously, he invokes R’hllor—a god of
life, by the admission of his clergy—very explicitly: “The Red God has his due, sweet girl, and only death may pay for life” (CoK 31 Arya 7: 348). Although this
may be merely a figure of speech—a reference to his near- death by flame—I sus- pect he is referring to R’hllor, just like the gods of sea and air, as constituent aspects of the Many- Faced God. However, one might reasonably ask how the devotees of the Many- Faced God are able to reconcile the respective attributes of these gods with one another; certainly, these conflicting mythoi seem mutually incompatible, at least according to their own proponents.
One could approach this problem in one of two ways. For instance, I think it telling that attempts to reconcile each of the religious traditions, both with each other and with the Many- Faced God, could well succeed. We could say, for instance, that the Many- Faced God is indeed all gods at once, being something like a kind of “reality substrate” from which all points of difference emerge. Being many- faced, the god is polysemous and indeterminate; although it has no properties of its own, the dynamic processes that at least partially constitute the character of the deity might be argued to produce things with determinate prop- erties, understood as instantiations of opposites: hot/cold, wet/dry, good/evil, etcetera.7Everything appears as an opposite of something else, and all things
that come to pass are due to these opposites acting in according with a kind of cosmic “justice” or “vengeance”—the process by which opposites are reconciled and once again subsumed within the dynamical and indeterminate godhead: “Into that from which things take their rise they pass away once more, as is ordained; for they make reparation and satisfaction to one another for the injus- tice according to the appointed time” (Anaximander, qtd. in Russell 116). Fol-
lowing such a model, one could argue that all of the gods—whether Seven, old gods, Red God or Great Other—may simply be examples of such opposites, whilst the grand panoply of history is reduced to a mere process by which oppo- sites are re- absorbed into the generative substrate that is the Many- Faced God. Yet this theory seems totalizing in a way that doesn’t quite accord with Martin’s interest in multiple narratives, multiple views. Rather than assuming that He of Many Faces is comprised of all of the gods, including their accidental features, what if the Many- Faced God were only comprised of their shared, nec- essary features—such as sublimity, inexorability and judgment? That is to say: what if the Many- Faced God is intended to capture the possibility that all gods— regardless of the contingent details underpinning their cosmology, ethics or given worldview—are instead the imperfect reflections or readings of a coex- tensive teleological force active in Martin’s universe? A force that extends into the physical facts of the matter whilst providing some kind of momentum and direction to causal proceedings? What if, in fact, there is a god?
Consider that when Jaqen H’ghar invokes the Red God, he renders in no uncertain terms the importance of Arya giving him three names: “This girl took three that were his. This girl must give three in their places. Speak the names, and a man will do the rest” (CoK 31 Arya 7: 348) Moreover, when Arya asks
Jaqen to instead take her to Riverrun, he refuses outright: “Three lives you shall have of me. No more, no less. Three and we are done. So a girl must ponder” (CoK 31 Arya 7: 348). Why is Jaqen H’ghar so insistent? It is certainly not due
to fear of contravening convention, or otherwise infringing upon his social obli- gations. Moreover, he is by no means opting for the less dangerous path; even despite his skill and expertise, offering to quietly assassinate anybody in the entire world is likely to be more taxing than stealing a horse and chaperoning a girl to Riverrun. Indeed, his choice seems entirely inscrutable until we realize an important fact: that Jaqen H’ghar’s insistence essentially constitutes a form of religious observance. He seems convinced that the deaths of himself and his two companions were a certain kind of necessary event: part of the well- ordered unfolding of the universe. However, Arya’s intervention jeopardized the proper outcome of events and so Jaqen H’ghar is forced to make amends by offering Him of Many Faces three more lives in recompense. Who dies and who lives is largely immaterial; what is important is that three men who were expected to die did not, and it is up to Jaqen H’ghar to balance the books. Moreover, Jaqen himself cannot make the decision himself, because he is not able to render these judgments: as a faceless device of his god (thus a “Faceless Man”) he is but a pas- sive tool acting in the service of fate or some other profound teleological force. This is why he refuses to help her—not out of cruelty, but because he does not wish to sin in the eyes of his deity.