In George R.R. Martin’s doorstopper fantasy series, A Song of Ice and Fire, dragons torch castles, men rise from the dead and fire-witches quaff poison to no ill-effect. But perhaps the most intriguing and fantastic element for our purposes is the guild of secretive assassins, the Faceless Men, who use strange magics to remove the faces (And identities) from their victims and assume their appearance for future use. The practice of post-mortem flaying and taking identities some parallels in our own history and religious imagery—for this purpose, we will focus on Mesoamerican rites, particularly those dedicated to Xipe Totec. Xipe Totec’s purview was wide: skin ailments, goldsmithing and newly raised corn were in his wheelhouse, but he is most notorious for his priests removing the skin from their sacrifices, and wearing it over their own for a period of time while seeking alms from the city. In this way, they assumed both the identity of the vanquished war captive and mimicked the process of germinating corn-sprouts. This is not dissimilar from the process that Martin’s Faceless Men use to work their sorcery. By drawing from such works as Grasset’s Violence and the Sacred, Sahagun’s Florentine Codex, Frazer’s Golden Bough and Dodds Pennock’s Bonds of Blood we can re-examine this strange and powerful magic that goes more than skin deep in history and fantasy.
About the presenterCharles Allison
Charlie Allison is a science fiction and fantasy writer based in West Philadelphia. He is currently working on his draft of a novel involving an interdimensional train, the follies of empire and the limits of divinity. When not writing he can be found discussing Mesoamerican cosmologies, steppe cultures and working on his headstands. His short stories have appeared in Podcastle, 9 Tales from Elsewhere, the Devilfish Review and the Stonecoast Review.