The Lady of the Golden Sword of Winterfell

I'm posting a part of a Chthonic Cycle essay of my blog here for this chapter (The Lady of the Golden Sword of Winterfell)

While Ned’s crypt chapter was the key that unlocked the revelation of Lyanna as Persephone the maiden, Cat’s godswood chapter was the key of Winterfell and the North as an underworld ruled by the Starks. It also hints at Cat as Persephone the wife. In this essay I will begin to analyse Catelyn’s chthonic voyage, as wife of the ruler of the Underworld as well as a chthonic mother. Catelyn’s first two chapters contain elements of Persephone, Pandora, Demeter and Isis.

Persephone, the wife of Hades Stark

So, let us go back to Catelyn’s first chapters, the chthonic godswood and bedroom, and see what it teaches us about Catelyn. The very first thing we learn about her is that she dislikes the godswood and all that it represents by extension: the North, Old Gods, the winter, the cold, the harshness, gloomy Winterfell. It is the first sentence of her very first point of view, and we have not even heard or seen her through any other point of view yet.



Then we learn who Catelyn is by birth name and where she grew up – a Tully from Riverrun.



Catelyn describes it as pleasure garden. It is alive with light, sound, songbirds, spices and perfume. Riverrun’s godswood is a pleasure and feast for the senses. And even the shadows are dappled with light. Symbolically, Catelyn thus originates from a living world.

It is only by the third paragraph that we learn where ‘this godswood that she dislikes so much’ actually is located: Winterfell.



It is the complete opposite to her: dark, silent, smelling of decay, and the trees and canopy are crowded so close together no light can reacht he surface. It is a place of shadows. It is not a garden, but a wilderness, the abattoir of gods with no names, an underworld. And she also hints that the castle is ancient too and a gloomy place to her too. So, we now have a picture of Catelyn Tully who grew up in a world that was a feast for the senses and now must call a gloomy castle and wilderness of decay and shadows her home.

The fourth paragraph tells us why that greatly disliked place is her home – she is the wife of Ned Stark, the ruler of the underworld.



And what a way to introduce Ned Stark to us in Catelyn’s mind – the husband who just took a man’s life. And the whenever going with man's life makes it sound he takes a man’s life often. While Bran’s chapter gives us the information why and how Ned took Gared’s life, Catelyn’s generic expression would fit perfectly with a ruler of the underworld or the embodiment of death.

She finds her husband in the godswood, cleaning the blood of his greatsword Ice, seated on a stone, beneath the weirwood, beside the black pool of cold water. This is the first time we actually see Ned Stark through Catelyn’s eyes.



He is cleaning the blood of a man he beheaded from his blade, surrounded by underworld symbolism: the weirwood with bark as white as bones and leaves the color of bloodstained hands, seated on stone, and water black as night. It is such a place of death that Catelyn’s feet can’t even make a sound – the forest floor swallows the sound of her feet.



But I want you to take notice of the fact that Ice lies across Ned’s lap, unsheathed. It is an image we will see twice again, in two different contexts. That is the position of the swords in the laps of the statues in the crypts of Winterfell, as well as Robb’s sword when Tyrion visits Winterfell upon his return from the Wall.



… and so does Tyrion.

All three images are echoes of each other:

• In the crypts: stone likenness of former Lords of Winterfell and Kings of Winter, on a stone seat, with two direwolves at their feet, and a bare sword in their lap.
• Robb Stark: on the stone high seat, with two direwolf heads carved out, and an unsheathed sword in his lap, while he is acting Lord of Winterfell, in the absence of his father.
• Ned Stark:seated on a stone, with bare steel in his lap, talking about the baby direwolves with his wife.

Aside from the clearly repeated imagery of a Lord of Winterfell, with each echo we are given three different reasons for the bare steel (in the order of appearance).

• Practical: to clean the sword (Ned Stark)
• Superstituous: to keep vengeful spirits in their crypts
• Hostile: as a sign to a visitor that they are unwelcome (Robb Stark)

The cleaning does not apply to the stone statues nor Robb, nor does keeping vengeful spirits in place apply to Ned and Robb beneath the weirwoord or on the high seat respectively. But Ned Stark cleaning Ice can be seen as an echo of the unwelcome sign, as much as it is echoed in the crypts. And this is actually echoed in Jon Snow’s dreams of the crypts and Theon’s unsettled feelings when he has to guide Lady Dustin in the crypts. Even Ned Stark is aware of the hostile atmosphere in the crypts when he visits it with Robert. So, when Catelyn sees Ned Stark beneath the weirwood image cleaning the blood of a beheaded deserter from Ice, not only is it an ominous image of an executioner, but also basically a hostile image.

In this manner, we are introduced to Catelyn as the married Persephone, wife of Hades. Persephone was dragged from a flower field to the underworld, alive, and had to call that dismal place home ever after. We do not often associate Catelyn with flowers, but the memory of Riverrun’s lively garden does end with Catelyn remembering how it scented of flowers (there is also the snippet of Cat remembering she once wore a wreath of flowers when playing at Oldstones with Lysa and Petyr). And it was at Riverrun that Ned took Catelyn to wife(1).


Once, Catelyn is established in this introduction as a Persephone, through her marriage with Ned as Hades, while disliking the underworld so much, Catelyn’s first chapter proceeds to give us a window on how Catelyn attempts to reconcile herself with her fate. Catelyn attempts to soften her stern, distant, formal husband who is seated in a hostile manner with love and intimacy. As his wife she is the sole one in function with the ability to do that. But even then Ned’s initial response seems cold and distant.



And yet, despite the formal and distant voice, Ned always first relates to her as the father of her children. He always asks her where the children are, and children are the ultimate symbol of new life.



Though direwolves are chthonic animals – the Starks’ hellhounds – in this conversation they are pups still, both new life like children and cute furballs to fall in love with or be charmed with.

Catelyn attempts to cover and ignore the underworld surroundings. She covers up the forest floor, turns her back to the weirwood and ignores the sensation of being watched. Notice too what Catelyn uses to cover the forest floor: her cloak. And what is her cloak, if not a marriage cloak? In my own language (Dutch) we have a figure of speech that if translated literally means – to cover something with the cloak of love. The correct figure of speech in English would be – cloak of charity. But here, it is love that Catelyn uses and refers to.

But that cloak of love cannot actually make the underworld disappear or turn her husband into a southern lord ruling an area of the realm of the living.



Even a toddler has to learn the inevitable facts of their new, young life as soon as possible in Ned’s eyes – that winter is coming. It’s as true as the expression of Valar Morghulis – everybody dies. It means basically the same thing, really. With winter being the dead season, the expression means – death is coming. Catelyn talks of cute pups, squabbling young children and toddlers and love, and it is met with a saying about death coming. And these are the Stark words, alone. She considers the northerners strange as in the modern ‘weird’ for it, but of course Catelyn here equates the Stranger with a northerner as well.

Next, her loving wife tactic does help her husband in sharing with her, but that sharing inevitably implies she cannot ignore the underworld, but made into a participant of ruling it.



George has already showed us that Catelyn is trying to ignore the underworld connotations by covering it with her wedding cloak of love. And in that sense, a sword has a double entendre. Lady Dustin refers to the double entendre when she talks of Brandon Stark, and Daario’s arakh and stiletto have naked wanton women for hilts.



Sex and swords go hand in hand (literally in Daario’s case). Certainly, the paragraph of Catelyn watching Ned polish his greatsword is not explicitly lustful. But notice how the paragraph lacks the chill that Catelyn feels when it comes to the Stark words. One would suppose that if Catelyn only regarded Ned oiling the sword in a morbid context, she would feel that same chill. Instead, she watches with fascination and finds it beautiful, heroic, kingly. Hence, the sexual connotation is still implied, as is the losing of her maidenhead, since Ned cleansed it of blood and Catelyn only ever bedded her husband.



Ned polishing Ice and Catelyn watching echoes the privileged intimacy of marriage that Catelyn has with Ned Stark. The next chapter does not shy away from telling us that they have a healthy sexual relationship that they both enjoy, as is hinted already by Catelyn’s fascination with Ned polishing Ice.



Catelyn may dislike the underworld – the place, the attitude and what it requires from her husband – but she loves and desires her husband, even though she did not choose him initially. Not only does she find the sword has its own beauty. She loves his ‘name’ and his ancestry. The final lines of the paragraph about Ice, implies she regards Ned Stark as a man with the blood of kings and ancient heroes. He may not be the dashing womanizer as Brandon or Daario, but he has his own beauty to her, one she saw at their wedding when he looked vulnerable. Only Catelyn knows him in the intimate manner of lovemaking.

With the hint that theirs is a good marriage, Ned proceeds by sharing his concerns about the desertions and Mance Rayder as King-Beyond-the-Wall. Catelyn in return shares her fears about it to Ned.



Here we get the first indication that Catelyn has a keen intuition.She is in touch with her feelings and she senses a foreboding. Despite, being of the Faith and southern, she is the first person to fear the Others are a possible threat, while Ned – who should know better as a Stark – follows a maester’s rational beliefs². And she is actually correct. In just her first chapter alone, she has three correct forebodings.

• Darker things beyond the Wall than a King-Beyond-the-Wall: the Others
  
• The direwolf killed by an antler in her throat: the Baratheons and Starks in opposition
  
• Advizing Ned to guard his tongue around Cersei

It is a great pity that he did not heed his wife’s advice months later, once he realized Cersei’s children were not Robert’s. While Catelyn’s decisions, choices and opinions are often cause of much debate with opinions varying between brilliant and stupid, there is no denying that Catelyn is remarkably astute and her intuition superb here. I cannot but help notice that Catelyn hits the mark thrice, while she is seated beside that cold, black pool and made eye contact with the weirwood behidn her. It is almost as if she is an oracle in this chapter, or one of the three Norns at the Well of Fate (Urdarbrunnr). It certainly is something we need to store away in the back of our minds, because if Catelyn does fulfill the roles of one of three Norns, then we ought to consider two other women at Winterfell to have similar abilities – an older matron, and a younger maiden.

And no matter how much she might dislike the underworldly godswood and North, her sense of foreboding here as well as what follows after reveals that Catelyn is in the right realm for her: she delivers her husband, ruler of the underworld, the news who of the living world has died.


And here we see Catelyn in an underworld Persephone role, apart from being the ruler’s wife. Since she originates from the terrestrial realm, south, but now lives in the underworld, she is the bridge between both worlds. And George has Catelyn alone be the connection by having the messages from the south given to her first, before they are relayed to Ned. In her second chapter this bridging role of Catelyn via messages from the south to the north is repeated, in a rather contrived manner.


And these messages are all related to concerns of the underworld:

• the dead: who died, and thus joins the underworld permanently and becomes a subject as well as how they died
  
• the mourners
  
• the visitors: who of the living comes to visit the underworld

She relays Robert’s story how Jon Arryn died in the first chapter, while the contrived message from Lysa adds the information that he was murdered.



Catelyn mentioning that she saved this message for Ned implies that she usually does not keep the message for Ned to see himself. It implies Catelyn handles word from the South, even about death or illness herself, and simply informs Ned solely when it is about someone important.

Though Ned inquires after the mourners, we also learn he asks after the living for her sake. Ned is not concerned about the living who remain south for his own sake or that of the Northern underworld.



Of much more importance to Ned are visitors of the underworld as it requires him to prepare the underworld for the visitors: guides, a feast, entertainment, his associates responsible of other sections of the underworld such as a representative of the Night’s Watch.



With what we have seen from Catelyn earlier, it seems peculiar that Catelyn is the one who proposes to warn Benjen Stark of the Night’s Watch. The Wall and the Night’s Watch seemed Ned’s focus. I am not pointing it out because she is a woman or the wife, but because she has this dislike of the godswood, the weirwood tree, the Stark words and a fear for the Wall and what is beyond it. Would Catelyn have given advice on communication with the Night’s Watch regarding a deserter or wildlings? I doubt it. Though evidently, in the next chapter she advizes Ned what to do with Robert’s offer to make Ned Stark his Hand. I would say that she takes initiative to have a Stark representative of the Night’s Watch present when Robert visits, because she is the bridging character between the southerners (the living) and the northerners (the underworld).

I would also like to point out how Ned offers Catelyn to visit Lysa at the Eyrie.


It is one of the few moments that Ned’s speech is filled with life symbolism. Since a Persephone belongs to both worlds and in myth voyages between the two yearly, here we get a subtle reference for Catelyn to resurface south.

Demeter of the lovely hair, the mother who bathes

If Catelyn’s first chapter contrasted Riverrun’s garden to Winterfell’s godswood as well as the Faith against the Old Gods, George starts Catelyn’s second chapter once again by focusing on symbolism of life and death. Catelyn has been furnished in the hottest room of Winterfell.



It is as if Catelyn is describing a little haven of the living world in the heart of the underworld, and almost just for her. Again the paragraph is full of elements referencing life – the hot springs, blood rushing through a living and breahting man – that keep death at bay, conquer death even as it drives chill away and keeping the earth from freezing, so that they can grow food and flowers in a glass garden that otherwise could not be grown North.



Catelyn’s bedroom is her haven of life, and as a setting contrasts the godswood, Ned’s haven. Take notice how it is clarified to us from the start that this is Catelyn’s bedroom, not their bedroom. Hence, it is not Ned’s bedroom. A married couple sharing a bedroom and only one is a modern assumption. But in historical, feudal times and as explicitly stated at the start of Catelyn’s second chapter, the hot bedroom is hers and Ned is a visitor there (and he visits it often apparently), whereas Catelyn was the visitor in Ned’s godswood. It is a crucial detail that impacts the dynamics we witness in this chapter between them. When Catelyn visits Ned in the godswood, we can see her in a Persephone role of the woman who is bound to the underworld through marriage. But in Catelyn’s haven another chthonic woman emerges – Demeter, the mother goddess.

Demeter was the goddess of the harvest and fertility as Demeter Sito (“she of the grain”). Where Persephone symbolized the fruit, flowers and grain itself, her mother Demeter was the one with the power to decide whether life grew or not. It was not Persephone disappearing that caused famine directly, but Demeter’s wrath over her daughter’s abduction. In that sense she was a mother-goddess, or venerated as mother earth. As the divine teacher of agriculture, she therefore was a corner stone goddess of civilisation, and therefore also the laws people had to abide in order to avoid the wrath of the gods.

In Accadian myth her venerated daughter is Despoina, who is a much wilder version than Persephone. Despoina was born from the copulation of Poseidon as a stallion and Demeter as a mare, after Demeter had attempted to escape Poseidon, but failed. Demeter’s rape was followed by her bathing. Hence, one of her epiteths was Lusia (“bathing”) and Thermasia (“warmth”), for Despoina and Demeter were much more tied to spring sources. In Catelyn’s second chapter George repeats these references several times:

• a warm room, because of scalding hot springwater where Catelyn hardly ever needs to raise a fire in her hearth.
• glass garden to grow vegetables, fruit, and flowers
• hot scalding baths.

That Catelyn seldom needed to raise a fire in her hearth is a peculiar detail. The goddess of the hearth and home was Hestia, Demeter’s sister. With Catelyn as mistress of Winterfell and homemaker it is as if George is hinting at us – do not think of Catelyn as Hestia (who was a virgin goddess anyway). He very much stresses that warmth and hotness is related to Catelyn, but is not in any way related to the firehearth.

Scalding, hot baths feature repeatedly in Catelyn’s chapters.



There are other Demeter eptiteths and symbols that feature throughout Catelyn’s arc, and I will go into them in upcoming chthonic essays regarding Catelyn. But I will mention another feature here that is often mentioned in relation to Catelyn’s bathing and her final thoughts before her throat is cut at the Red Wedding – her hair.



Descriptions about food, clothing, hair and color of eyes are common in novels, but George tends to have different POVs focus heavily on different description topics. Tyrion’s chapters tend to have the eloborate food descriptions, even when it is a daily meal of little importance (peas anyone?). Sansa’s chapters focus heavily on clothing. Catelyn’s chapters feature hair a lot. That is not to say that other features are completely absent in each of these character’s POVs. Sansa’s chapters describe food and hair as well, but only of characters that are important to her or feasts. In Catelyn’s chapters even the most unimportant squire passing by will get a beard and hair description, while she only focuses on attire at special occasions when it actually matters. It is not just the hair of every Dick and Tom that matters to Catelyn, but her own auburn hair is most precious to her. And we learn why just before she is killed – Ned loved her hair.

Hair is a feature of Demeter. When she is referenced in Greek poetry she is called ‘beautiful/rich haired Demeter’.


The Homeric Hymn to Demeter served for centuries as the canonical hymn of the Eleusinian Mysteries. In another peom ascribed to Homer he again references her beautiful hair in relation to a legend where Demeter takes the youth Iason as her lover.



I quoted the paragraphs about Ned’s and Catelyn’s lovemaking already in relation to the innuendo of the polishing of the sword, but I repeat it here to show how that paragraph references several life symbols.



It mentions the sensation of feeling, as well as seed, quickening and making a child – all related to new life. In her haven, Ned is not the Lord of Winter, but a youth, as naked and empty-handed as he was born, as vulnerable as he was on their wedding day. The elements of a wedding, a vulnerable youth and conception of a son appear in on of Demeter’s legends. At a wedding party, she chooses the youthful Iason for a lover and takes him to a plowing field where they have intercourse. This is how she conceives a son by Iason. When Demeter and her lover return to the feast it is evident to all the other guests what the couple has been up to. Jealous, Zeus strikes the human Iason with a lightning bolt, which would prove his vulnerability. In the above quoted scene, Catelyn did not conceive, but thinks of it while the paragraph refers to her wedding day. And Catelyn did became pregnant with Robb either during her wedding night or shortly after, before Ned Stark rode off to war again.



Later in the same chapter we get further allusions to fertility symbolism as Catelyn gets up from the bed naked, while maester Luwin is present. Maester Luwin delivered all her children, or at least four of them³. And of course, though not outrightly mentioned, there is the implication that all those children, except for Robb Stark, were both conceived and born in Catelyn’s bedroom.

And of course, with both Ned and Catelyn naked and wide awake it is clear to any visitor, such as Luwin, that the Lord and Lady of Winterfell had been sexually active and not woken from sleep. There is even a moment of embarrassment for Ned when Catelyn gets up from the bed, naked. This scene would fit with the wedding guests able to guess what Demeter and Iason were up to before.



What is evident is that in this haven of life and fertility, Catelyn’s focus would be on the South, civilisation and how it can be an advantage for her and her children, not in terms of what is best for the North or Winterfell, aka the underworld. While the chapter starts with the life and fertility symbols it especially includes symbols of motherhood. Hence we get a shift from Catelyn who can consider the Wall’s and Northern interests in the godswood, but in her haven of life her southron ambition surfaces. So, we get a shift from the chthonic Persephone to the chthonic Demeter. Persephone is not in conflict with Hades, but Demeter is. And it is this conflict we witness in Catelyn’s room, a conflict of priorities, understanding and interests.

Ned’s understanding and priority lies with his duty of ruling the underworld.



The Tully words are “Family, duty and honor,” in that order of priority. For her, one’s first duty is to family and then to the king and the honor the king showers to Ned. Governing the North is somewhere at the end of the list of duties. With Demeter family comes before duty as well. It is her duty to ensure the growth of crops and life. But when her daughter is stolen from her, she lets the world starve in defiance, even though the king of the gods, Zeus himself, agreed to Hades taking Persephone for a bride. Persephone on the other hand regards the duties of ruling the underworld as her own as much as it is Hades’s.



And while she wonders why she cannot make him see, she simultaneously fails to see his duty. I would also like to remind you that the earliest chthonic essay revealed that blindness is a feature of the underworld. Catelyn fails to make Ned see, because as ruler of the underworld he is mentally blind to the interests of life and heavens, except when it pertains who and how they died.

They reach a momentarily impasse, until Maester Luwin arrives.



I want to pay some attention to the opening and closing of that window. Ned Stark opens the window after their lovemaking in Catelyn’s warm, fertile room and he lets the night air in.



Basically, when Ned Stark lets the night in, he balances the warmth of life with the chill of the underworld. And while looking out into the night once in a while he remains connected with his realm. It is then that he decides for himself that he will refuse Robert. When Maester Luwin is shown in, he closes the window. Gradually, Ned is disconnected from the underworldy elements, and then Catelyn lights a fire to burn both Lysa’s message as well as drive the last chill out. Both Catelyn and Luwin outnumber and outwit Ned Stark into accepting the position of the King’s Hand – not for honor, not to have daughter as queen, but to solve the murder of a dead man.

I also ask you to remember the phrase “Maester Luwin was shown in,” for the next section I will discuss.

The Eleusinian Mystery

I have used the quotes about the lens of Catelyn’s second chapter already on my home page in how it cleverly tells the reader to look for deeper and coded layers in George’s writing . The same paragraphs also fit in the chthonic reading of the books. In Persephone of the Winterfell Crypts I mentioned how a box containing a secret was one of the symbols for the Eleusinian Mysteries, a mystery cult about both Persephone and Demeter. Mystai (initiates of the mystery) would enter a great hall, Telesterion, at the major site of Eleusis. It is believed by scholars that the rituals within that hall comprised of several elements:

• Dromena = things done. For example a re-enactment of the Persephone-Demeter myth
• Deiknumena = things shown. For example the displaying of sacred objects by a hierophant.
• Legomena = things said. For example comments that accompanied the deiknumena.
• Aporrheta = the unspeakable. The term for all three elements combined. It was death to divulge the secrets, and playwrights allegedly were tried and possibly even condemned to death over it in actual history.

The scenes and paragraphs about Lysa’s message all revolve around these concepts. First, maester Luwin is shown in. He mentions the box and how it contains a lens, as a hint to look more closely, and that is how Luwin inspected the box itself and found a secret bottom inside that contained Lysa’s message. The sealed letter is then produced by Luwin in front of Ned and given to Catelyn, meanwhile saying the content of the letter is for Catelyn’s eyes only. So, we have a box containing a secret, and what can be called deiknumera (things shown). And it is exactly the deiknumera that is displayed to Ned and Catelyn by maester Luwin, who is akin to a hierophant. A hierophant was trained and knowledgeable in arcane principles. He was a type of priest of the mysteries, particularly the Eleusian Mysteries. Within the Faith a Septon teaches and performs the public rites and beliefs of the Faith, whereas a maester is a learned man of the Faith who has studied and trained in the more mysterious arts.



The fact that the hierophant Luwin declares the secret within the box for Catelyn’s eyes only makes her an initiate, a mystae. It turns out the letter is coded in the secret language that Lysa and Catelyn developed as children. Catelyn is the sole person who can decipher the letter, furthering her as an initiate. Her feelings of dread and knowledge the message contains grief, while it is still sealed, also attests to Catelyn being an initiate, since initiates are familiar with the mystery already. Of course, Catelyn does not know what it actually reads before she opens it, but she has a premonition of it.



Catelyn is more than an initiate though. She very much is already tied to Demeter herself. The secret and news that was dreadful to Demeter was about the underworld. Note how often underworld vocabularly is used surrounding the appearance of the letter, Catelyn’s feelings and Ned’s expressions.

The scene proceeds with the legomena (things said). Of note here is that from the moment that Catelyn remarked that a lens is an instrument to help them see until Ned orders Catelyn to “tell them” what the message is about, George does not once use the word said or speak, except once to highlight that Catelyn dares not speak. For a complete page one of the most often used verbs in literature is absent in the middle of a conversation between three characters. Only four verbs related to speech are used in that passage – ask myself, command, admit, told – and each only once. This is quite extraordinary and George does this to emphasize the “showing”. But once it is the turn of the legomena, the speech verbs said and tell get repeated several times.



The discrepance between the total absence of the verb to say for a full page and it then appearing seven times in less than a page right after it shows how deliberate George uses (or does not use) the verb in the message scene. It is even used twice within the conversation itself, despite the fact that both Ned and Catelyn refer to a written message, not an actual spoken one – a message that needed to be read not heard. Notice too how Luwin is asked to stay by Catelyn for his counsil – for things he can say – or how he averts his eyes in order to not see. Where in the deiknumena-section George explicitly writes how Catelyn dares not speak, he emphasizes in the legomena-section that Luwin dares not see. Finally, notice how Ned asks her what Catelyn is doing, and instead of simply showing us (and Ned), Catelyn tells him (and the reader) what her intentions are. And of course, once again we are reminded of the secrecy, as we have been in the previous parts, for Catelyn burns the message, so that nobody else can read it – not even Luwin or Ned.

The content of Lysa’s message fall in the category of the dromena (things done) – the queen murdered Jon Arryn. And we are also reminded that the message is aporrheta (unspeakable), punishable by death.



George basically turned the murder mystery of Jon Arryn into an Eleusinian Mystery, and we should be on the look-out for similar vocabulary use and scheme when GRRM reveals the identity of Jon’s mother in the coming books.

Pandora’s Box

The Eleusinian Mystery works insofar that Catelyn has ties to the Demeter archetype, but the who-dunnit seems rather mundane in comparison to the meta-physical aspect of the Eleusinian Mysteries. These Mysteries after all were about a mother losing her daughter, her wrath, the seasonal cycle, agriculture and the spiritual truth regarding nature – without death there is no life, and without life there is no death. Meanwhile Lysa’s message is not even remotely a truth; it is a lie. Jon Arryn was murdered, but not by Cersei Lannister. He was poisoned by his own wife, Lysa, who sent the Eleusinian Mystery box to Catelyn.



In that sense, Lysa’s box is more akin to Pandora’s box, which actually was a jar. It became known as a box because of a 17th century mistranslation. Pandora and her box is most famous by Hesiod’s telling in Works and Days (700 BC) that leaves no doubt of Hesiod’s misogynistic mind. Works and Days is an 800 line poem that attempts to teach his brother Perses (and humanity) how to live a frugal, honest, hard working, god abiding life, after Perses cheated Hesiod out of part of his inheritance because Perses squandered his own half. With his telling of Prometheus and Pandora, Hesiod attempts to explain why man has to work and suffer.

According to Hesiod, originally humanity (created by Prometheus) existed only of men who worshipped the gods with sacrifice and were taken care of. To help his creation, Prometheus tricked Zeus into choosing the inedible to be sacrificed to the gods and leaving the edible for humanity. He gave Zeus two plates of sacrifices, where cow meat was hidden inside a stomach on one and horns were hidden inside a layer of fat on the other. Zeus picked the tasty looking platter of fat, thereby determining that man would pay homage to the gods by burning the bones of the animals they ate. Angry, Zeus took away man’s ability to use fire, but then Prometheus stole the fire from Mount Olympus and gave it back to humanity. Zeus punished Prometheus to suffer for eternity in Tartarus by being bound to a rock and having his regenerating liver eaten daily by an eagle. But Zeus also created the first woman, Pandora.



The first woman was created out of earth and water by Hephaestus (god of fire and smithing), as beautiful as a goddess, a sweet-shaped maiden who could weave and sow (taught by Athene) with grace and longing (given to her by Aphrodite), but who would also sag over the years by cares. Hermes gave her a shameless mind and a deceitful nature. In other words, Zeus created women as evil, deceitful, beautiful temptresses that spend a man’s money he worked so hard for, but over time become old hags that men are required to depend on when they are old and sick. For Hesiod all women were golddiggers.



Zeus gifted Pandora with her jar to Prometheus’ brother who in the sight of her beauty forgot Prometheus’ warning not to accept Olympian gifts. The jar contained all evils to man – death, sickness, old age, plagues, hunger, war, etc. When Pandora opened it, she released these evils and humanity suffers them ever since. Whether she opened it by accident, on purpose or out of curiosity is unclear, but she closed the jar again, much too late. All that was left in the jar, the moment she closed it again, was ‘hope’ (literally ‘expectation’)4.

Lysa’s message brings all evil upon the Starks. Without it, Ned Stark would not have accepted Robert’s offer and would have remained North. Robert would have huffed and puffed and left for King’s Landing again. And even if Robert would have attempted to war the North, Ned Stark could have defended the North easily from Moat Cailin and with the help of Howland Reed’s crannogmen. And if Ned Stark did not plan to leave the North together with Bran, Sansa and Arya, Bran would not have climbed that fateful day as his form of goodbye to Winterfell. There would not have been another assassination attempt on Bran’s life, and thus no abduction of Tyrion nor Tywin’s revenge on the Riverlands for it. Ned Stark would not have found out that Cersei’s children were not Robert’s and would still have a head. Lysa’s and Littlefinger’s desires and deceit packed and gifted to Catelyn as an Eleusinian Mystery was a box of doom. The irony here is that Pandora’s box becomes a curse for the underworld, which ultimately becomes a bane for the world of the living.

But who is Pandora then – Lysa or Catelyn? One sends the lie in a box as a gift, while the later opens the lie and uses it as the final argument to convince her husband into accepting the job of the king’s Hand for her own desires to make her daughter the future queen of Westeros. Lysa’s obsessive desire to have Petyr Baelish for a husband turns her into a mercenary woman who does not care about the mysery and innocent lives lost that her message caused, while Petyr’s obsession for Catelyn (in the shape of her daughter Sansa) also drives the plot. Since Pandora is the archetype of women’s share in the mysery unleashed on the world by or for them, both Lysa and Catelyn show Pandorian aspects. Notice too how Catelyn lit a fire (stolen from the gods by Prometheus) in which she burned the evil lie that came out of Lysa’s box.



It is believed by scholars, based on epiteths and artwork on pottery – that Hesiod’s Pandora was his personally altered version of an earth goddess. Traditionally Pandora is taken to mean ‘all-gifted’, which is what Hesiod describes – each god giving Pandora gifts. But it actually might have meant ‘all giving’. Classic scholars generally assume that secondary (or tertiary) mythological characters splintered off from the primary god or goddess, while still preserving some of the aspects of that primary character. This tends to happen especially with goddesses, and most often to Great Goddesses. This general Mother Earth of Mother Goddess personifies nature, fertility, motherhood, creation but also destruction. Over time, these aspects end up being splintered across several later generation goddesses with more specialized functions. The Greeks first have the primordial Gaia (‘earth’), mother of the Titans. Gaia’s daughter Rhea (‘ground’) becomes the Mother Goddess or Great Mother of the Olympian gods. Rhea’s daughter Demeter is also a Mother Goddess who provides( and refuses) nutrituous bounty of the earth5. Where Gaia is primal, Demeter is a cultured earth goddess who teaches agriculture to humanity. Demeter’s daughter Persephone represents the cultivated harvest itself. Pandora seems to have had a similar nature in providing humanity with earthen gifts. Even post-Hesiodic pottery represents Pandora rising from the earth with her arms upraised to greet her husband Epimetheus (Prometheus’ brother). Hesiod was aware of this earth-giving aspect of Pandora, because he has Athena gift a wreath of woven grass and flowers to adorne her head, which is typically Persephone’s symbol. But where Demeter and Persephone symbolize the cultured goddesses, Pandora is the humanized one. There is even a hint in one of the notes in a 6th century play (BC) of a cult of Pandora. Ultimately, Pandora seems to have been a chthonic goddess(6).

A possible esoteric revelation that was part of the Eleusinian Mysteries would have been the knowledge that life is bound to the underworld. Seeds have to be planted into the soil, into the ground and thus are born from the underground to feed the living. Animals need to be bred but also killed in hunts or slaughter to feed other lives. Ecology is a constant recycling of dead organisms to feed the living ones. Persephone’s myth does not only explain the cause of the seasons, but symbolizes this inevitable union of the ecological life and death cycle. And the pre-Hesiodic myth about Pandora probably illustrated those aspects – the earth giveth, and the earth taketh. It is likely that she had or opened two jars, instead of just the one, since Homer’s Illiad mentions two urns from which Zeus gives blessings or evils onto humanity.

Osiris’ coffin, Isis and the golden phallus and Demeter of the golden sword

When Ned asks at the introduction of the box and lens what it has to do with him, we can answer, “Indirectly, everything”



As a ruler of an underworld heinous crimes such as murder concern him. And as ruler of an underworld he plays an inevtiable part in the myth of Pandora’s box as well as the Eleusinian Mysteries.



Unfortunately, Ned Stark will never return home again either. Instead he loses his head.

I will jump to an entirely different pantheon and chthonic pairing – the Egyptian one, namely Isis and Osiris. Osiris was the Egyptian ruler of the underworld Duat. But he only became the god of the afterlife, after he was murdered by an envious Set, a trickster jackal god of chaos, deception, violence, storm and desert7. According to Plutharch’s “Of Isis and Osiris” from the 1st century CE, Set devized a plan where he took King Osiris’s body measurements and had a beautiful, ornate box made with the help of the Queen of Ethyopia. At a banquet he presented this box and said that he would gift the box to the person who could fit himself in it. Of course only Osiris accomplished the challenge, since it was custom made to fit only him. But as soon as he lay in the box, Set and his accomplices put a lid on it and threw him in the Nile where he drowned. Osiris’ consort Isis searched for the box in order to give her husband a proper burial. She found it in a tree in Byblos (in present day Lebanon, settlement since 7000 BC), where the coffin had floated to, and took it back to Egypt where she hid it in a marsh. But when Set went hunting that night, he discovered the box and dissected Osiris’ body in a rage. He then scattered Osiris’ body parts all across Egypt to ensure that Isis could never find him again. And so Isis’ legendary search for her husband’s body parts starts. She manages to reassemble Osiris’ body parts except for his phallus that was eaten by fish. So, together with Thoth (mediator, scribe, magical art, science, judgement of the dead) she manufactures a magical golden phallus for Osiris. She tansforms into a kite and with Thoth’s magic copulates with Osiris and conceives a son, Horus the Younger, who sets out to avenge the murder of his father and dethrone Set. Meanwhile, once Osiris was properly mummified and buried, he rose to the throne of the underworld.

The deception by envious Littlefinger – who wishes to lure Ned Stark away and bring him down with Lysa’s message in a box, as well as his intention to rule the Riverlands, Vale and North combined, if not all of Westeros – matches Set’s deception with the custom made coffin and plan to murder Osiris. Lysa’s message in a box is a death trap.

The silent sisters return Ned’s gathered bones to Catelyn in Riverrun. Notice the connection between Rivverun and Isis discovering Osiris’s body after it floated down the river. The silent sisters had accompanied Ser Cleos Frey who served as a mediator between the Lannisters and Starks, and it was Tyrion who ordered the return of Ned’s bones (as well as false envoys with Cleos Frey to break guest right, kill Edmure’s guards and attempt to free Jaime Lannister). Of course bones are numerous puzzle pieces that need to be assembled. The paragraph of Catelyn looking on her dead husband mentions how his dismembered skull has been reattached with wire to the body.



The most glaring parallel here with the Osiris myth is that Ned’s greatsword Ice is missing, while that particular sword is a phallic symbol in Catelyn’s eyes (in her first chapter). She admired Ned’s sword when he was stroking and polishing it – thought it had a beauty of its own. She thinks of the good ache Ned’s other sword leaves her with, his seed quickening to make a son, remembering her wedding when she did conceive his first son who later goes to war against the Lannisters to make them pay for killing Ned. And here, as she looks upon Ned’s reassembled remains she finds his sword missing. In fact, Ice has been destroyed and reforged in two other swords, ornately decorated with gold. So, we definitely have an echo of the mythical dynamics of Osiris, Isis, Thoth, Horus the Younger and Set woven into the story8, with Ned as Osiris, Catelyn as Isis, Ser Cleos Frey and/or Tyrion as the mediating Thoth, Robb Stark as Horus and Petyr Baelish as Set.

As the reforged sword with golden hilt, not only are Oathkeeper and Widow’s Wail phallic symbols. The golden sword is also an epiteth for Demeter in the Hymn to Demeter I already mentioned.



Oathkeeper ends up in Lady Stoneheart’s hands (formerly Catelyn), and notice that when it is laid in front of her, she only has eyes for the golden pommel.



Torches and fruit are some of the most well known attributes Demeter carries. Less known nowadays is that she carried a golden sword or sickle, which she used in the battle against the Titans along with her sibling Olympians when they attempted to dethrone Kronos, earning her the epiteth Khrysaoros or ‘lady of the golden sword’.

So, with the reforged Ice with a golden pommel in Lady Stoneheart’s hands, we have both Isis in possession of Osiris’ golden phallus as well as Demeter of the golden blade. And while the golden lion symbolizes life (sun symbol), it also has ruby eyes that look like red stars – with stars being death symbols. Blended together it makes for a sword that incorporates the union of life and death, which is exactly what Osiris’ golden phallus represents – a life bringing phallus of a dead man.

Ultimately, the golden phallic sword shows how multiple mother godesses of different mythologies unite in Catelyn. This should not be much of a surprise since the Greeks themselves linked Demeter to Isis. The Greek historian Herodotus for example compared the two in the 5th century BCE. And when Alexander the Great conquered Egypt, Isis became identified with Demeter and the Mesopotanian Astarte, who Catelyn also shares features and events in her arc with. I will discuss Astarte more in depth in the essay of Catelyn’s chapters at the Eyrie. So, not only does it make sense that when George includes elements referring to mother goddess mythology, that we should find commonalities to other goddesses of other mythologies, but that George explicitly and intentionally could use the commonalities, because they have already been identified 2500 years ago as such by the Greeks.

Catelyn’s link to Isis does not end with her being shown Ned’s bones and noticing he is missing his sword. Catelyn orders the silent sisters to bring the bones to Winterfell while escorted by Hal Mollen.



One of Isis’ roles was making sure that the dead were properly buried and protected. That is why she is so often depicted on ancient thombs.

Neither Hal Mollen nor Ned’s bones have reappeared in the books ever since though, or at least not recognized as such insofar we know. We do not have explicit confirmation which route Hal Mollen took – along the Red Fork to the Trident and the Crossroads and then North via the King’s Road, or directly North of Riverrun past Oldstones, Seagard, the Twins and then towards the Neck. If the first they would not have reached the Trident safely, with Tywin and the Mountain marching from Harrenhal, the Bloody Mummers plundering the country or Roose Bolton who held the Ruby Ford before he went South to retake Harrenhal. People fleeing the Riverlands mention to Brienne on her way to Duskendale that even Silent Sisters have been molested.



Most likely though, Hal Mollen would have taken the second route, since Catelyn never seems to fear that Hal Mollen met with Tywin’s armies. In fact, as she passes through the Whispering Wood where Robb battled the Lannisters for Riverrun at the start of the war and she sees the remains of that battle she wonders about Ned’s bones.



If Hal ever crossed the Twins, then Lord Walder Frey remained mute about this to Robb and Catelyn. And since the Freys purposefully desecrated Robb’s and Catelyn’s corpses after the Red Wedding, they would not have hesitated to do the same if Hal Mollen crossed the Twins after the news of Robb’s marriage to Jeyne Westerling had reached them. Still, Hal Mollen might have crossed just in the nick of time and into the Neck, but could not have passed Moat Cailin as it would have been taken by Victarion and his Ironborn by then. At present Hal Mollen and the Silent Sisters may be sheltered by Howland Reed in the Neck, a marsh, and it was in a marsh Isis attempted to hide Osiris’ body. At least Lady Barbrey Dustin seems to suspect that Ned’s Bones are at the Neck at present.



A proper burial is something that every culture known to man finds important. It does not matter what you believe or even that you believe in after life, but the majority of people hold to some type of ritual that respects the integrity of the deceased’s body. Purposeful desacration of the remains of the deceased is one of the biggest taboos and therefore often used in wartime as the final demoralizing insult to the enemy, which is exactly what Lady Dustin intends to attempt and what the Freys certainly did to Robb Stark and Catelyn.

There are indications, however, that the desecration of Starks and the prevention of the proper burrial might actually aid the surviving Starks. Remember that their enemies are dealing with a family that is steeped in chthonic symbolism while alive, whose power may actually grow as dead spirits roaming the underwordly realm that is the North (see the Cursed Souls of Eddard and Robert). Even Ned’s southern wife ends up being resurrected as Lady Stoneheart, and she is only wedded to a Stark. Had the Freys buried her properly according to Riverland’s customs of burning a body on a boat, Beric could never have resurrected her. As for Ned Stark himself, not only is there Ned’s damnation of plenty of people in the chthonic dungeons, but Bran and Rickon meet and talk with Ned Stark down in the crypts at his empty tomb before they receive the confirmation message that Ned is dead (aGoT). Arya talks with a voice she believes to be her father at the weirwood of Harrenhall (aCoK) before she decides to escape, and Jon dreams of Winterfell’s godswood with its weirwood having Ned Stark’s face (aSoS).



Osiris only became the ruler of the afterlife in death, but Ned Stark already was a ruler of of the underworld in life. Why would death make him less so? Because the previous Lords of Winterfell and Kings of Winter do not seem to have power anymore? But they are actually properly buried within the tombs of the crypts, beneath their statues, with swords in their laps. Their residual power seems contained at one location. As long as Ned Stark is not properly buried, he seems to be free to manifest himself in the crypts as well as outside of them.

The Greek myth of King Sisyphus (of present day Corinth) is a fine example to make my point. In Ancient Greece it was believed that those who were not properly buried would be ignored by Charon, the ferryman, and left at the shores of the upper world at the Achethon, denied both the afterlife in Hades and life in the flesh with the living. King Sisyphus did not wish to be in Hades at all, and he used this to his advantage. Before dying, he requested his wife to prove her love for him by throwing his naked corpse onto a public square once he was dead. When she had done so, he begged Persephone for permission to be allowed to return to the upper world to scold his wife for the improper burial. Persephone allowed it, but Sisyphus refused to return to Hades after his wife finally buried him as custom decreed it. Hermes had to drag him down by force. At heart the message is that improper burial can enable the deceased to remain an influence in the upper world. And this seems to be what Ned Stark’s spirit seems to be doing. And without a living Lord Stark of Winterfell, the threat of the Others and the upper world messing with the underworld this may actually be for the ultimate benefit of all.

Notes

3. Does “all her children” also include Robb Stark? If so, then that means that maester Luwin was at Riverrun before he became maester at Winterfell, since Robb Stark was born at Riverrun, not Winterfell.
4. It is unclear what the implications are of hope remaining in Pandora’s jar. If you regard the jar as a prison that kept evil at bay, then hope is still imprisoned and people are denied hope. Or you could regard hope as an evil, and that humanity is spared from such foolishness in the face of despair and death. Of course the subject of hope in Pandora’s jar can deserve its own philosophical essay in light of all the mysery and tragedy in aSoIaF, if anyone ever cares to do so.
5. I mentioned how Demeter is referred to as the rich-haired. Not so incidentally, so is her mother Rhea, who was the earth goddess before Demeter.
6. Hesiod’s one-sided account may have been distorted by his personal views regarding women. His written source is the oldest we have and connects Pandora solely with evil, but both older and younger depiction on pottery seem to convey a more rounded version: blessings as well as evil. Add the fact that Hesiod was bitter and angry over his brother Peres squandering first his half of the inheritance away and then bribing judges to be granted part of Hesiod’s half. He wrote Pandora’s myth in a poem that served as his personal, moral answer to his brother. And in that same poem he tells a story of one brother (Prometheus) attempting to help humanity, while the other is fooled into taking Pandora for a wife. Did Hesiod blame a woman as the cause of his brother’s spending and did he use Prometheus and Pandora mythology as a literary parallel to chide his brother for his foolish choice? He may have been one of the earliest poets who founded the later tradition of using mythology and legends to make a philosophical and social argument. And despite being regarded as the ancient scholar on Greek myth, there are elements about his life and personality that make it rather unlikely that he was an initiate into the Eleusinian Mysteries. He was the son of an immigrant from Asia Minor and middle class farmer who lived in Beotie (with the Greek city Thebes) and thus not near Athens. He wrote a poem how a muze gave him a laurel staff, but not a lyre. This indicates he was not trained in a traditional manner. And then there is his great dislike for women. How likely is it that the cult of Eleusis would have initiated such a man into the secrets of two earth goddessses?
7. In the long history of Egypt, Set was not always an evil god. Ancient Egypt as a cultural source existed for over 3000 years, from the Early Dynastic times to the Ptolemian and Roman period. Those thousands of years were not without invasions and inner struggles, which was reflected in how a god, including Set, was considered a beneficial god or an evil one. For this essay though, I’m using the later views on Set, after he was demonized.
8. Yes, Dany’s burrial of Drogo and Raego also echoes the Isis-Osiris myth. Let us leave that for Dany’s chthonic cycle.