The Faith of the Seven’s Incest Prohibition

The Faith of the Seven’s Incest Prohibition held that close-kin unions were sinful and that their offspring were abominations in the eyes of the gods. Its force in the realm, however, was complicated by Targaryen custom: the dynasty continued to marry siblings even as the Faith’s teachings rejected such unions. The resulting accommodation was not a settled agreement so much as a recurring tension between religious doctrine and royal practice, eventually answered by the Doctrine of Exceptionalism.

The rule and its uncertain enforcement

The prohibition drew on the Faith’s sacred teaching against a brother lying with his sister, a father with his daughter, or a mother with her son. The Seven Speakers later affirmed that these unions and their offspring were condemned by the laws of the Seven. Yet the Faith’s conduct toward the Targaryen kings did not amount to a clear declaration that royal incest was lawful. During Aegon the Conqueror’s reign, six High Septons held office between 11 AC and 37 AC. Aegon remained on good terms with each and visited the Starry Sept when he came to Oldtown, but none spoke out against his marriages to his sisters, and none pronounced them lawful.

Silence at the highest level did not mean that the prohibition had faded. Village septons, holy sisters, begging brothers, and Poor Fellows continued to regard brother-sister marriage, and a man taking two wives, as sinful. The gap between the courtesies of the court and the convictions of ordinary religious figures left the issue unresolved: royal practice could continue without securing broad religious assent.

Dynastic marriages and religious resistance

The succession made that tension concrete. Aegon’s sons had no sisters to marry, so they sought brides elsewhere. In 22 AC, Prince Aenys married Lady Alyssa, the fifteen-year-old daughter of Aethan Velaryon. Both were the same age and shared Valyrian features; their union was understood as a marriage between cousins. It proved happy and fruitful, and the following year Alyssa gave birth to Rhaena.

Rhaena’s birth raised a different kind of dynastic question. Aenys was the unquestioned heir, but there was disagreement over whether his infant daughter’s arrival affected Maegor’s place in the succession. Queen Visenya proposed betrothing Rhaena to Maegor, then eleven. Aenys and Alyssa opposed the match, and the High Septon warned Aegon that the Faith would not look favorably upon it. He proposed his own niece, Ceryse Hightower, as a different bride for Maegor. The episode shows the prohibition entering royal deliberation not as an abstract teaching, but as a constraint on a proposed marriage and on the political arrangements built around the royal family.

The dispute resurfaced around Jaehaerys and Alysanne. Septon Mattheus warned the Queen Regent and her advisers that a brother-sister marriage at that moment would be seen as a grave affront to the pious, and that other religious voices might oppose it. Their advisers abandoned the idea of marrying Alysanne to her brother and arranged instead for her to wed Orryn Baratheon. But Jaehaerys and Alysanne married despite that plan. Mattheus then denounced the union as an abomination and predicted that it would plunge Westeros into war; Jaehaerys rebuked him, and the septon fell silent. The confrontation made visible what the earlier courtesies had concealed: the prohibition could become a direct challenge to royal authority.

Exceptionalism and the royal exception

Jaehaerys’s answer was not to deny the Faith’s general rule. The Seven Speakers, chosen to argue his case throughout the realm, acknowledged the prohibition against close-kin marriage and the Faith’s condemnation of its offspring. Their qualification was that the Targaryens were different. The doctrine held that their ancestral customs came from Valyria rather than Andalos, and pointed to their appearance and their ability to ride dragons as signs of their distinct nature. Septon Alfyn presented the distinction through the image of the lion and the aurochs: both were noble, but neither could live by the other’s nature.

Jaehaerys developed this argument in King’s Landing with the assistance of Septon Oswyck and especially Septon Barth. In later years, the Citadel and the Starry Sept called it the Doctrine of Exceptionalism. Its logic preserved the ordinary prohibition while arguing that it did not apply in the same way to the dragonlords. In this account, the rule remained valid for the rest of the realm; royal lineage and Valyrian tradition were invoked to mark out a dynastic exception. The evidence describes an argument that was carried by the Seven Speakers and later given a name, rather than a wholesale abandonment of the Faith’s teaching.

A continuing boundary

The dynasty’s practice endured alongside the prohibition. The account of Aegon’s reign identifies his marriages to his sisters as an issue that the High Septons left formally unresolved. Later, at Aegon II’s coronation, Helaena is identified as both his wife and sister. Such unions underscore the distance between religious teaching and the marriages made within the royal house, while the Exceptionalist argument provided a way to defend that distance without claiming that close-kin marriage was permissible for everyone.

Marriage also served purposes beyond the Targaryen dynasty. Aegon’s queens arranged unions between noble houses across the realm in the hope of binding the conquered kingdoms together: Ronnel Arryn married a daughter of Torrhen Stark, and the heir to Casterly Rock married a Redwyne girl. Those cross-house matches show another political use of marriage, one that joined families without relying on the sibling unions contested by the Faith. The prohibition therefore stood at the intersection of religious teaching, royal identity, and political alliance: it remained a stated moral boundary, even as the rulers most able to defy it claimed a special place beyond its ordinary reach.