The Drowned God

For thousands of years the Ironmen were the terror of the seas, proud as they were of their ferocity and of their self-rule.

In every place they brought their uses, based on their Old Law and on the cult of their Drowned God.

Every Iron Island had a Salt King and a Stone King, and that indicated a domination over the island during peaceful times, however very rare, and the command in war times, certainly much more frequently. The King of all the islands was chose from them. This use continued until king Urron made the throne hereditary slaying with betrayal all the other candidates, in occasion of the assembly to chose the new king.

By the end of the lineage of Urron due to the coming of the Andals even in the Islands, the House Greyjoy took on absolute power over the Islands, arriving by time to dominate even great part of the Continent.

Everywhere the Ironmen arrived they brought the cult of the Drowned God, based on looting and piracy. This religion was always very violent and intransigent, in particular with other deities. Enemies and prisoners of war were sacrificed to the Drowned God through drowning in the sea waters.

Clergymen of the cult preached in streets, but they don’t scorned even to take part personally to wars and lootings, that were always conducted in the name and by will of their God. One of the principal rites was the bless of believers that  were kneeled down on the ground while their head were wetted with a flow of salt water, with the backing of hymns for the divinity.

But the cult of the Drowned God was known especially for a very obscure use that includes the resurrection of its adherents, first drowned in the salt waters of sea and then resurrected by a Clergyman by the power of the God. It happens very often, if not every time, that the drowned, taken by fear at the time of the rite, began to struggle and refused to go drowning, but the Clergyman is always surrounded by followers, the so called “Drowned Men”, even them relived during other precedent rites, who assist him to immobilize the initiated. The body of the newest adherent is completely immersed until even the littlest living energy has totally leaved him. Then the Clergyman, totally naked, exits from waters, and with him his followers who lay the corpse on the seaside, they arrange themselves around him forming a circle and start to massage his arms, his legs and his chest, while the Clergyman, opening his month, performs the most important phase of the rite. He gives the dead the “Kiss of life”, delivering him from death. Once the initiate is completely relived his brothers one by one kiss him on his forehead and the Clergyman admits him definitively in the sect, praying that his mind and his actions could be now guided by the God.

We talked about the fanatic intransigently of the Ironmen for every other religion. Only one other deity was in fact recognized, the Storm God, eternal antagonist and enemy of the Drowned God, to whom he opposed specially unleashing on sea and earth every type of cataclysm, and obstructing navigation, fishing and agriculture.

Even because of this in the Iron Islands, already hostile for their morphology, there aren’t many farmers or shepherds, but only salt, stone and iron mines, that contributed to do of the islanders true pirates, who looked for other more prosperous and rich zones what they didn’t want and they couldn’t cultivating.

The cult of the Drowned God, and with it the Old Law in general, were recognized and liberalized, in the limits of possible, for the Ironmen by all the Targaryen kings, after the fall of king Harren the Black, fall that put an end to the Greyjoy dominion on the West Continent.