Tag: architecture

In a church that has seven sides, each of them significant, which God has to host the door to get in?

Good question!

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My guess is that you probably have the three male gods on one side and the three female gods on the other, and the entryway is the Stranger (symbolizing the whole death and rebirth thing). 

In terms of ordering, I would guess that if the bottom side is the door/Stranger, and then going around the room on the right hand side, it probably goes Smith, Warrior, Father, Mother, Maiden, Crone. 

Thus, symbolically, the Smith and the Crone are in the back (because who cares about peasants and old women), the Warrior faces the Maiden he’s supposed to protect, and the Father and Mother are side-by-side.

Dear maester Steven, in the past you’ve talked about creating new Great Septs in Westeros, but do you have any architectural designs in my mind for these that contrast the white and black marble septs in King’s Landing and Oldtown? For example, what would you think of a Sept that is seven septs in one (similar to how Saint Basil’s cathedral is eight churches in one)?

Well, I think @joannalannister and others have correctly called it that there would be a Golden Sept in Lannisport. (I’m imagining the walls and ceiling in gold mosiacs like St Marco’s in Venice with tons of candles to make the whole thing but larger-than-life grandiose statues in full-blown Baroque style, like Bernini but in gilded bronze) 

The Vale’s Sept would probably be called the First Sept or something like that to emphasize their love of tradition and ancestry – given the Vale’s marble industry, the whole things going to be in gleaming white marble and quite grand but austere, with the main feature being huge statues of each of the seven in different colored marble. I’m also guessing that because of when the whole thing would have been built, the Warrior and the Father would be most prominent. 

Similarly, I’d guess that the Stormland’s Sept would be made all in glorious, gleaming polished hardwoods and have beautifully carved wooden statues of the gods. I’m guessing the Smith is probably depicted as a woodcarver or lumberjack. So maybe looking  like Russian Orthodox Churches made of wooden with onion domes and the like? 

Dorne’s Sept would have to be rather unusual, given the ways that their Rhoynish culture clashes with the Faith’s normal attitudes about gender roles, sexuality, and so on and so forth. So I’m guessing hardcore Marianism, but with more of a focus on fertility and sexuality, and also a bunch of former Rhoynish gods reinterpreted as saints and the like. Basically I think of some of the more colorful Hindu temples.