In “House of the Dragon,” mystic women reach beyond the patriarchal imagination

“You’re a strange kind of woman,” Daemon Targaryen (Matt Smith) tells Alys Rivers (Gayle Rankin), the resident witch of Harrenhal who intimately, inexplicably understands his every thought and desire. First introduced near the beginning of “House of the Dragon’s” second season, Alys perches alongside Daemon throughout his sojourn in the haunted castle, beguiling, provoking and instructing the prince until the season finale, when he, following her directions, steps into the cosmic ether and briefly reunites with another strange woman.

“It’s all a story, and you are but one part of it,” says Helaena Targaryen (Phia Saban), her voice echoing across the hall. “You know your part. You know what you must do.”

While it’s not yet fully known how Daemon will use Helaena’s guidance, the convergence of these three characters adds additional weight to the idea that the baseborn healer and the neglected queen, two women separated by status and distance, have a hand behind much that will transpire from now until the dragons stop dancing.

Alys occupies the position once held by a maester in leaky, understaffed Harrenhal, even though induction as a so-called “knight of the mind” is reserved strictly for men. Helaena, fortified by Valyrian blood, has claimed the dragon Dreamfyre as her own, but hates the prospect of burning people and refuses to mount her. Unlike most women in Westeros, Alys and Helaena are elevated by circumstance to peer over the constructed limitations of their sex. But instead of leaping across to the other side and trying to adopt the roles of men, they accomplish something more subversive: reaching deep into their well of supernatural powers and recasting their supposed weakness into a kind of influence and authority that far transcends mere politics, war and temporal science.

In Westeros, a woman is measured by her supposedly weaker body’s ability to perform the rituals of emotional labor so that a man can reap the political benefits, and beget trueborn children so that a man can pass on his family name. She who can command a dragon may ride to war, but that is rare, and even the most esteemed of women are deemed unfit to consider theological questions or the higher learning reserved for maesters. In this context, Alys and Helaena fulfill their truest purpose outside the confines of mind and materiality, using the heart tree of Harrenhal’s godswood, a nexus of the Old Gods’ power, as their conduit to travel across time and space. It’s not the kind of undertaking the maesters would sanction, but it’s also not something that the maesters could even comprehend accessing.

“Perhaps magic was once a mighty force in the world, but no longer,” Maester Luwin (Donald Sumpter) insists to Bran Stark (Isaac Hempstead Wright) in “A Clash of Kings,” the second book of George R.R. Martin’s main series. “What little remains is no more than the wisp of smoke that lingers in the air after a great fire has burned out, and even that is fading. Valyria was the last ember, and Valyria is gone.”

Gayle Rankin as Alys Rivers in “House of the Dragon” (HBO)Luwin, of course, is wrong. Bran, like Alys and Helaena, possesses gifts of magic, and his potential manifests itself only after a fall that deprives him of the ability to ride a horse, stab people with pointy objects, defend the innocent and carry out the other traditional duties of a Westerosi knight. In the eyes of society, Bran has become unmanned by his disability, but while he can no longer walk, he learns how to fly.

Bran’s disability and Alys’ and Helaena’s apparent frailty mirror the pervasive belief in medieval Europe that a woman’s weakness trapped them within a body that acted as a “prison for the soul,” preventing them from intellectually connecting to God and tempting them with sin. Their defiance of binary patriarchal standards, in turn, reflects a shift in the later medieval period in which women reframed that very notion to claim a relationship with God no less significant than that of men; if they were indeed meek, gentle and weak in body, then they imitated Christ, whose caregiving, affective emotion and physical suffering muddled the negative connotations of those traditionally feminine attributes.

As such, women could access “divinity,” initially the exclusive preserve of men, and the social influence that came with it, through embodying the physicality of a sometimes feminine-coded Jesus Christ. “The mother can give her child to suck of her milk, but our precious Mother Jesus can feed us with himself, and does, most courteously and most tenderly, with the blessed sacrament, which is the precious food of true life,” wrote Julian of Norwich (c. 1343-1416), an anchoress who documented her visions of God, in “Revelations of Divine Love.”

Furthermore, if a woman was susceptible to impulses of the flesh as was commonly believed, then by enduring self-discipline they would prove themselves worthy of receiving and transmitting God’s messages. But to experience divine visions through the mortal body came at great physical cost, often in the form of seizures, migraines and other afflictions. Or, perhaps, it was the other way around. Martin alludes to this suffering in his books, where Melisandre of Asshai (Carice van Houten), the red priestess of R’hllor who advises Stannis Baratheon (Stephen Dillane), leaks black, smoking blood and feels fire searing her insides while searching for a vision in the flames.

“It was an art, and like all arts it demanded mastery, discipline, study. Pain. That too,” he writes from her point of view, referring to Melisandre’s prophetic sight. She believes that her visions do not come from the mind, but from R’hllor himself, who speaks to his chosen people “in a language of ash and cinder and twisting flame that only a god could truly grasp.”

To some of these women, pain in general could also induce feelings of “indestructible joyness” because of the meaning they found in their suffering. Julian, who was afflicted with a terrible life-threatening illness at age 30, compared Christ’s crucifixion to the experience of childbirth as both painful and redemptive, a mother’s hardship contrasted with a father’s obligation to defend his children with his body. Both were seen, in different ways, as imitating Christ and his passion.

Women who sought spiritual emancipation were not always welcome, especially if they strayed too far from orthodoxy, associated with heretical sects or, in the transition from feudalism to capitalism, frustrated efforts to subjugate women, their labor and their reproductive power into exploited and unpaid economic resources. Ironically, it was the Church’s growing tendency to limit female participation in religious life that caused many of them to turn to nonconformist traditions that allowed them to preach the Gospel and engage in theological discussions. Secular and religious authorities who sought to persecute those women suggested that rather than speaking in communion with God, they had, true to their nature as weak-willed and weak-bodied individuals, been seduced by illusions from the Devil.

The Faith of the Seven now dominates religious life in most of Westeros as the state-sanctioned church, dividing men and women among the seven aspects of its great divinity. “The Father rules, the Warrior fights, the Smith labors, and together they perform all that is rightful for a man,” says Septon Meribald in “A Feast for Crows.” While Helaena appears to worship the Seven as befits a queen, her connection to the Old Gods provides an outlet to express powers far beyond a patriarchal imagination. Unlike some of the bolder mystics of medieval Europe, however, she is relatively circumspect about her powers and thus attracts little unwanted attention. Only when her brother Aemond Targaryen (Ewan Mitchell) keeps badgering her into joining another smallfolk-burning spree does she sharpen her insights and prophecies into threats.

“Will you burn me as you did Aegon?” Helaena asks, referring to their brother the king (Thomas Glynn-Carney). “You burned him and you let him fall.”

“What you say is treason,” he warns.

“Aegon will be king again. He’s yet to see victory. He sits on a wooden throne. And you . . . you’ll be dead,” she tells Aemond, who loses the will to keep pressing.

Alys does not appear to arouse much suspicion for now, though in “Fire and Blood,” one maester will later record that she was a witch who lay with demons and “[brought] forth dead children for the knowledge they gave her.” The book also notes that Alys is much older than she looks and can see visions in the flames, much like Melisandre from “A Song of Ice and Fire.” The possibility that Alys and Melisandre can tap into the power of two supernatural systems has all sorts of implications, though only Melisandre holds easily visible political power. And in her quest for the truth, Melisandre must contend with enemies whose sordid, hateful imagination of a foreign, baseborn woman with magical and political agency more closely resembles the show’s heavily sexualized adaptation of the character than the more complex (but still sexually liberated) portrayal from the books.

If “Game of Thrones” fell into the same Madonna-Whore trap that Martin laid to take apart, “House of the Dragon” is much more careful in its depiction of Alys, who stays comfortably in her clothes. In this regard, she and Helaena hew closer to traditional medieval mysticism, which did not typically use sex for religious emancipation, rather than the practices ascribed to some of the more esoteric heretical sects. In other ways, however, the differences are vast. Martin’s world is one in which metaphorical strokes materialize seemingly distant themes into something more palpable; power with responsibility is a fire-breathing dragon, climate change is a horde of icy demons and spiritual conviction is, at times, a command of occult powers with tangible effects.

In Westeros, the fate of the world may well depend on Alys and Helaena, who peer into the wisdom of the Old Gods and convey their insights to Daemon and others who have a part. To most people, they are much like the existential threat that casts its shadow over the margins of their vision — omnipresent, and yet unperceived.