Has there even been mentioned any restrictions or rules concerning the practice of magic or sorcerery in Westeros, or is it more of a social thing?

Are you asking if sorcery is illegal in Westeros? Then the answer is no, for the most part. There’s plenty of examples of people using the services of maegis of various stripes, from Targaryen kings down to Lannisport smallfolk.

However, it does seem as if sorcery is fairly taboo in Westeros, as we can see the Faith of the Seven being pretty consistent in their opposition to sorcery, as we can see in the case of street preachers condemning Bloodraven or the High Septon pleading with Aegon V not go through with his ritual at Summerhall, or (and this is the closest we get to illegality) Baelor I burning the writings of Septon Barth for his heretical investigations into sorcery.

I definitely see why Patchface is likely the prophet of the Drowned God; he seems likely to have been a prophet even before he encountered the Drowned God when the ship went down, and went a little nuts after looking the God (demon?) in the face. I’m a little mystified by Thoros though. What did he do to draw R’hllor’s attention, and what led R’hllor to bestow his gifts on Thoros, who by all accounts was kind of a drunken lunatic before joining the Brotherhood Without Banners?

“he seems likely to have been a prophet even before he encountered the Drowned God” – how do you figure this?

As to why R’hllor worked his will by the Mummer’s Ford, I think it was a miracle. And as GRRM the recovering Catholic well knows, a miracle is cloaked in mystery and ineffable, inexplicable grace. Thoros notes that it has nothing to do with Thoros himself:

“I have no magic, child. Only prayers. That first time, his lordship had a hole right through him and blood in his mouth, I knew there was no hope. So when his poor torn chest stopped moving, I gave him the good god’s own kiss to send him on his way. I filled my mouth with fire and breathed the flames inside him, down his throat to lungs and heart and soul. The last kiss it is called, and many a time I saw the old priests bestow it on the Lord’s servants as they died. I had given it a time or two myself, as all priests must. But never before had I felt a dead man shudder as the fire filled him, nor seen his eyes come open. It was not me who raised him, my lady. It was the Lord. R’hllor is not done with him yet. Life is warmth, and warmth is fire, and fire is God’s and God’s alone.”

Now, there are some arguments that people have made that the spells and prayers that Thoros had been taught are secular magic hiding behind a religious wrapper, and that now that magic is coming back into the world, the spells are working again. (After all, the old priests never brought anyone back from the dead either.) After all, Melisandre often cloaks secular magic as reliigous in nature.

However, I disagree. While it is possible that Thoros and Melisandre were trained in secular magic that they learned in the Red Temples as novices, Beric Dondarrion wasn’t. And yet Beric turned his blood into flame (the true version of Thoros’ old trick) without uttering a syllable or a spell, and brought Lady Stoneheart to life with a kiss that did not require filling one’s mouth with fire first.

So I think it had nothing to do with Thoros, and solely to do with the ineffable plans of the Red God.

not the previous poster

Aren’t R’hllorism and magic fundamentally connected? Every red priest we’ve seen openly practices magic. They also seem to use magic as a selling point for the religion. Melisandre is a true believer, while some of her magic is intentional misdirection, she thinks and does real magic and attributes it to R’hllor. If today high ranking Scientologists came out and started performing real magic and predicting the future and performing miracles, you’d think they’d get a lot of converts from other religions. Like whether the religion is true can’t be proven from the books, but she is in an honest to god magic cult, and that seems like it should be appealing.

Fundamentally? No.

As I’ve discussed before, there are R’hllorite priests who know non-R’hlloric magic (like Melisandre or Benerro), there are R’hllorite priests who do not know non-R’hlloric magic who do R’hlloric magic (Thoros, Moqorro although he could be in the first camp), and there are people who are not R’hllorite priests and who don’t know non-R’hlloric magic who are able to spontaneously perform magic associated with R’hllor (Beric).

At the same time, there are plenty of examples of people who use the same kinds of magic without any associations to R’hllor: Dany sees fire-mages and meets shadow-binders in Qohor, there’s Bloodraven, etc.

Moreover, R’hllorism is not the only faith that is associated with magic – the greenseers of the Old Gods, the water-wizards of the Mother Rhoyne, the miracles attributed to the Seven or the Drowned God, the secret association between Valyrian steel, blood magic, and sacrifices to the Black Goat of Qohor, and so forth.

Do you think Stannis was a willing participant in creating the shadow babies, or do you think Melisandre just did it without letting him know what was going on?

As I suggest in my ACOK chapter essays, I think Melisandre told him that it was a necessary ritual (to prove his faith or to purify him or something), but didn’t tell him why it was necessary or what it would do. After all, “Melisandre has gazed into the flames, and seen him dead.” If R’hllor is the one true god and Melisandre’s visions are true – both propositions that Melisandre has gone to great lengths to try to convince Stannis of – then there’s no need to take action, much less to use black magic (which would seriously undermine those propositions) to kill him.

And after the fact, I think Stannis was in deep denial about what he had subconsciously experienced in the night – “I dream of it sometimes. Of Renly’s dying. A green tent, candles, a woman screaming. And blood….I was still abed when he died. Your Devan will tell you. He tried to wake me…Devan says I thrashed and cried out, but what does it matter? It was a dream. I was in my tent when Renly died, and when I woke my hands were clean.”

Could you help me understand why so many people think Drogo was Dany’s Nissa Nissa? She smothers him with a pillow in Dany IX, and in Dany X there is not a single mention of signs of “life” in his body – she’s preparing his truly-dead corpse. When she’s talking with MMD about blood magic, Dany says it’s HER life she wants as payment, and she hates MMD. The eggs then hatch as MMD is dying. Drogo’s body was… there. So where’s Nissa Nissa? Could it be that part of the legend is wrong?

I would not draw a direct line between what happens between Dany VIII and Dany X and the Nissa Nissa story, necessarily. GRRM describes it as a miracle, a sui generis event.

Because there’s a lot going on:

Dany agrees to a blood magic ritual to heal Drogo, and Mirri Maz Duur tells her that “only a death can pay for life.”
Dany is taken into the tent where the “shadows whirled,” which Mirri Maz Duur warns her about, saying that “once I begin to sing, no one must enter this tent. My song will wake powers old and dark. The dead will dance here this night. No living man must look on them.“
Dany’s child is slain by magic. While this could be due to the accidential exposure of Dany to whatever the hell was in that tent, Mirri Maz Duur takes credit and claims that Rhaego’s life was the cost for Drogo’s resurrection: “no, that was a lie you told yourself. You knew the price.” Then again, Mirri Maz Duur has been lying to Dany all along specifically to prevent the prophecy of the Stallion Who Mounts the World from coming to pass and to take revenge against Khal Drogo for enslaving her people.
Dany conducts a blood magic ritual based on whatever clues she’s gotten from MMD and from some unconscious urging. (Notably, when Dany awakes from her birthing bed, she’s already crawling towards her dragon eggs, with the words of “waking the dragon” ringing in her ears)
This ritual should not have worked on its own. As MMD says, although possibly trying to save her own life, “by itself, the blood is nothing. You do not have the words to make a spell, nor the wisdom to find them…loose me from these bonds and I will help you.”
This ritual definiitely involves the sacrifice of Mirri Maz Duur: ““it is not your screams I want, only your life. I remember what you told me. Only death can pay for life.”
This ritual also involves the ritual burning of Khal Drogo’s body and the three dragon eggs with him: “She climbed the pyre herself to place the eggs around her sun-and-stars. The black beside his heart, under his arm. The green beside his head, his braid coiled around it. The cream-and-gold down between his legs.” Note that Drogon’s egg came from Drogo’s heart.
This ritual also definitely involves a great heat as well: “she was the blood of the dragon, and the fire was in her. She had sensed the truth of it long ago…but the brazier and not been hot enough.” Remember, the sorceries of Old Valyia were “which were woven of blood and fire” (perhaps the words of House Targaryen are a secret riddle as to the source of their power?).
Finally, Dany also walks into the fire, bringing with her the blood of the dragon, the blood of Old Valyria.

Which elements of the ritual were necessary? Which were not? It’s hard to say when you’re talking about something that’s deliberately non-standard, and when the author is deliberately not systematizing magic in order to keep it magical.

What we can say is that this bears little resemblance to Nissa Nissa. Dany didn’t give a damn about Mirri Maz Duur, Drogo was already dead, whether the eggs were alive is difficult to say since they come from Asshai and that place’s relationship with life and death is borked. But certainly MMD didn’t sacrifice herself voluntarily, and it’s hard to say whether Drogo and the eggs count.

However…Dany might be considered a willing sacrifice.

do you think bloodraven lost his sense of self the same way bran is going to?

I think people are over-estimating the loss of self. Bran’s not gone, he’s just having trouble swimming through the gestalt of every greenseer ever and that’s making him a bit distant b/c he’s multitasking from a distance.

Looking at Bloodraven, who’s been the Three-Eyed Crow for at least fifty years, he certainly retains some sense of self:

“A … crow?” The pale lord’s voice was dry. His lips moved slowly, as if they had forgotten how to form words. “Once, aye. Black of garb and black of blood.” The clothes he wore were rotten and faded, spotted with moss and eaten through with worms, but once they had been black. “I have been many things, Bran. Now I am as you see me, and now you will understand why I could not come to you … except in dreams. I have watched you for a long time, watched you with a thousand eyes and one. I saw your birth, and that of your lord father before you. I saw your first step, heard your first word, was part of your first dream. I was watching when you fell. And now you are come to me at last, Brandon Stark, though the hour is late.”

The last greenseer, the singers called him, but in Bran’s dreams he was still a three-eyed crow. When Meera Reed had asked him his true name, he made a ghastly sound that might have been a chuckle. “I wore many names when I was quick, but even I once had a mother, and the name she gave me at her breast was Brynden.”

I know. I have my own ghosts, Bran. A brother that I loved, a brother that I hated, a woman I desired. Through the trees, I see them still, but no word of mine has ever reached them.

He knows his name, he remembers being a Night’s Watchman, he remembers the doggerel said about him when he was hand, and he remembers the strong emotional commitments he made in life – I’d say that’s a pretty good “sense of self” for anyone pushing 125, let alone a greenseer.

Hullo, I’m not sure if this was asked before, but here goes: do you think there is a reason as to why no one in Essos was able to hatch dragons while the Targaryens’ were still alive? We know that across the Narrow Sea a) dragonblood still runs strong 2) magic is much more common and less reviled than in Westeros and 3) dragon eggs are still extant, if exceedingly costly. I find it especially odd that no one in Qohor or Gogossos managed it, given the expertise of the latter two in bloodmagic…

1. Dragonblood and the Blood of Old Valyria not the same thing. Dragonriders were an elite within Valyrian society, and almost all of them died during the Doom and the rest not on Dragonstone died thereafter:

“The dragonlords had been gathered in Valyria as was their wont…except for Aenar Targaryen, his children, and his dragons, who had fled to Dragonstone and so escaped the Doom. Some accounts claim that a few others survived, too … for a time. It is said that some Valyrian dragonlords in Tyrosh and Lys were spared, but that in the immediate political upheaval following the Doom, they and their dragons were killed by the citizens of those Free Cities. The histories of Qohor likewise claim that a visiting dragonlord, Aurion, raised
forces from the Qohorik colonists and proclaimed himself the first Emperor of Valyria. He flew away on the back of his great dragon, with thirty thousand men following behind afoot, to lay claim to what remained of Valyria and to reestablish the Freehold. But neither Emperor Aurion nor his host were ever seen again.
The time of the dragons in Essos was at an end.
Volantis, the mightiest of the Free Cities, quickly laid claim to Valyria’s mantle. Men and women of noble Valyrian blood, though not dragonlords, called for war upon the other cities”

2. While magic was more common in the east, it was still less common than it had been. Hence the reports from Qohor of the return of magic with the dragons.

3. While it’s true that dragon eggs exist, the ones that Dany got were not fresh viable eggs: “the eons have turned them to stone,” as Magister Illyrio says. He got them for her as hugely expensive curios, but it took an act of spontaneous magic which GRRM has described as a miracle to make them hatch.

As for the blood magic angle, I think it takes more than just that – remember, Dany didn’t know blood magic when she hatched the eggs, and it took not just lives but also her presence as a Targaryen and the convergence of the very cosmos.