I'm going to try and choose my words very carefully, because you seem to have a propensity for tearing people (and their arguments) to smithereens. Nevertheless, it seems to me that you also respect intelligence. When I first read the Wheel of Time series, I was about sixteen, and my grasp of prose and plot wasn't nearly as strong as it is now. This is my second trip through the books, but I've only come as far as Crown of Swords. I've skipped ahead and read all I could of the Gathering Storm, but my knowledge of the material within Path of Daggers and Winters Heart is hardly extensive, while Crossroads of Twilight and Knife of Dreams are only a little more lucid.

Your proposal is practical when events are considered from our stance as readers, but only in specific instances. I don't think it would be suitable for widescale implementation, although I'm not sure that you were suggesting any such thing in the first place. If nothing else, I think I can lend some more weight to your list of cons.

This is what I’ve got:

1. Everyone is innocent until proven guilty.

One can only assume that, given the degree of sophistication that exists between the Aes Sedai, this axiom holds in Tar Valon, if not in a few other countries. If you follow that axiom to its logical conclusion, you can determine that anything you do to a darkfriend who has not been tried and found guilty of affiliating with the shadow, you are in fact doing to an innocent person.

I will concede that the treatment of darkfriend prisoners who are within the custody of the Aes Sedai has not been entirely indicative of that point – certainly I don’t suggest that Amico, Joiya and Ispan were treated as if they were innocent. Nevertheless, I cannot site any instance of torture. Ispan was bound hand and foot, force-fed sedatives, and lugged about with a leather sack over her head, but none of these things equate to the severity of stilling.

The White Tower has very strict regulations regarding the interrogation of any prisoner, as we see here:

"I fear that is proscribed, even were she not an initiate of the Tower." Adeleas said. "We are forbidden to shed blood in questioning, or to allow others to do so in our name."

and here...

That law forbade not only shedding blood, but breaking bones and a number of other things that any Whitecloak Questioner would be more than ready to do. Before any session began, Healing had to be given, and if the questioning started before sunrise, it had to end before sundown; if after sunset, then before sunrise. The law was even more restrictive when it came to initiates of the Tower, the sisters and Accepted and novices, banning the use of saidar in questioning, punishment or penance. Oh, a sister might flick a novice's ear with the Power if she was exasperated, or even give her a swat on the bottom, but not very much more.

[Robert Jordan, The Path of Daggers, page 109]

2. Stilling is said to be excruciatingly painful.

While we don’t see a whole lot of information about this, I feel that it is worth bringing up that being stilled is more than mildly unpleasant. Oftentimes, I have assumed that no physical pain would accompany the act whatsoever because nothing is really being cut, but consider how often a channeler reels back whenever one of her weaves have been sliced, as if slapped in the face? There is one instance in ACoS where Nynaeve tries to shield Elayne, but Elayne is already holding the source. Nynaeve describes the sensation as tantamount to striking an anvil with a hammer as hard as she possibly can and being taken by teeth-chattering reverberations for her efforts. How much more painful would it be for a channeler to have his or her connection to the One Power completely removed?

We see another indication of this point here:

[Moghedien] reached to embrace saidar, and her eyes bulged. There was nothing there. Nothing! It was as if she had been severed! She knew she had not – it was said that tearing was the deepest pain anyone could know, beyond any power to deaden…

How much of that pain comes from the sure and certain knowledge that the severed party will never be able to channel again? Well, I think only Robert Jordan could really answer that question. While I can speculate that the greater part of the pain involved in severing is probably psychological in nature, I am not willing to concede that some form of physical pain is not included in the package. Even so, I don’t think anyone should really discount the magnitude of psychological pain. The mind is a powerful thing, after all.

Given what we know of severing, I would chance to guess that the feeling is analogous to watching the love of your life get bulldozed by a speeding truck while you are helpless to prevent it, stacked ontop of being forced walk about covered in her blood and splattered entrails until the act can be undone. Even if someone tells you, “It’s okay, we can bring her back,” – even if you’ve seen someone raise the dead – you would still be marked with the memory of a pain beyond knowing for the rest of your natural life. While that punishment is probably sufficient for a sister of the Black Ajah, it is hardly suitable for an innocent woman.

This is probably one of the many reasons that Siuan doesn’t just have somebody else sever her so that she can be healed by one of the Asha’man (which raises an interesting question – would it matter if she was?), but that’s an entirely different can of worms.

3. Stilling may have permanent psychological effects on the severed party.

We don’t see a whole lot of people get stilled (or gentled) throughout the course of the books, and of the lot that we do see, Siuan, Leane and Logain are the ones that we read about the most. I think that this lends itself to some considerable misconceptions about how horrible stilling really is. Siuan and Leane both possess an admirable degree of courage, resolve and strength of will – and Logain was no pushover, either. In spite of this, Logain had to have a guard on him at all times while he was locked away in the White Tower to keep him from killing himself, while Siuan and Leane had to throw themselves into a cause that was greater than they were to survive as long as they did.

What about the others who have suffered stilling? Amico Nagoyin lost just about every scrap of her willpower before she was finally murdered, and by all accounts the woman seemed to answer truthfully when interrogated – and you can chalk that up to another one of the pro’s on your list – but not everyone reacted the same way as Amico. It is possible that, semi-conscious and bound as she was in tel’aran’rhiod, the impact of being stilled might not have been quite so pronounced as it was for, say, Siuan, Leane or Logain, but I have no evidence to support such a claim.

We see different reactions from the sisters within Elaida’s delegation.

He had to move; more Aes Sedai would be coming. Two lay on the ground near him, apparently unconscious, one with a nasty gash bleeding across her forehead. The third, an angular woman, was on her knees staring at nothing, clutching her head in both hands and screaming. She seemed untouched by all the splinters and pieces of the chest.

and then again…

The angular woman did not look at him or stop shrieking even when he knocked her over against the low stone coping of a well as he crawled past.

[Robert Jordan, Dumai’s Wells Chapter 55 of Lord of Chaos]

So, of the three women who were severed by Rand al’Thor, two were immediately rendered unconscious (perhaps from the violent nature of the stilling, perhaps from the exploding chest), and one of them was reduced to a trance-like shell of a woman who could not stop screaming. Worse yet, the sheer magnitude of this toll seems to take an effect on them that lasts for a considerable period of time afterward, as we see in this example:

One wept, face on her knees; the other two stared haggardly at nothing, one of them plucking aimlessly at her skirt. They had been much the same since yesterday; at least none of them was screaming any longer.

[Robert Jordan, A Crown of Swords, page 64]

This is what became of three Aes Sedai who were stilled. Three women who were tested and found worthy by the White Tower, who had endured the silver archways and proven that they could channel one-hundred weaves while under a concentrated assault of illusions and often painful distractions from their superiors. The fact that the reactions to the of the severed parties are so considerably different leads me to my next point in an argument against stilling anyone charged with affiliating with the shadow.

4. The characters in the books have extremely limited knowledge (at best) about the process of restoration.

As soon as Nynaeve restores Logain, a series of Aes Sedai haul her off to restore Leane and Siuan under the scrutiny of several other sisters, and immediately afterward we see that many yellow sisters consider her weave to be sloppy at best. A good lot of them immediately begin to expound upon ways to improve the weave – but there is no telling whether or not these improvements would have any effect on the degree of strength that the sisters are restored to.

We know that the women who were healed by Flinn appeared to have regained all of their strength, and we have no evidence to support that Logain has suffered any reduction in power. Robert Jordan did this to support the underlying theme that the greatest works of the power can only be achieved with the combined effort of men and women – but how many of the characters know this? Certainly some of them might speculate that there is an irrefutable correspondence that exists between saidin and saidar, but how many of the rebel Aes Sedai are willing to believe that the taint has been cleansed? Of those women, how many more would be willing to put so much faith in it that they would allow themselves to be touched, in any way whatsoever, by the male half of the True Source?

In spite of all the knowledge that the Aes Sedai possess regarding saidin and the taint, many sisters – Egwene is the only one that immediately comes to mind, but there are examples of others if I could be bothered to look them up – feel repulsed by the very thought of saidin. In Lord of Chaos, when Rand wraps Egwene in a weave of invisibility and ties it to the floor, she suffers from the unprecedented fear that simply moving around too much might expose her to the taint. She is not the only woman to come under those suspicions. How many Aes Sedai would feel comfortable allowing a man to restore her connection to the source, even if she were forearmed with the knowledge that she would be much less powerful if a woman conducted the operation?

5. Alternative methods exist to prevent prisoners from channeling.

Currently, shielding is the most common method by which a channeler can be kept under incarceration, but there is another alternative. Forkroot tea, for example, would leave the prisoners completely incapacitated in high doses, while lower doses would render them capable of channeling little more than a trickle. You could spare considerably less women to guard a sister who was under heavy sedation – even if you probably shouldn’t - and a sister who was severed from the One Power would still likely need at least one channeler present to keep her from killing herself (or to prevent her untimely assassination.)

6. Alternative (albeit extremely unpleasant] methods exist for forcing a sister to foreswear oaths.

The oathrod can be used to remove the oaths that keep sisters of the black Ajah bound to the dark. This is unpleasant and even painful, but IIRC, Pevera Sedai was willing to personally undergo the procedure. As it stands, Pevara Sedai seems to be doing a remarkable job with her Great Purge. You couldn’t very well say the same if she severed everyone she put to the question, even if she knew how to restore them. Even if Pevara had access to someone like Flinn, what sister in her right mind would support severing one of their own, only to be placed at the mercy of a male channeler?

One can assume that many other sisters would be likely to feel the same way about anyone else who fell under the accusation of affiliating with the Shadow, if for no other reason than to protect themselves from the same potential mistreatment.

So, to wrap things up:

Pro’s

1. The severed party can’t channel.
2. There is sufficient evidence to support that severing can now be reversed.
3. The severed party can be restored and severed again if found guilty.
4. Severed Black Ajah sisters are released from their Black Ajah oaths.
5. Men and women who have been severed may be more malleable as a result of the loss of their will to live.
6. An innocent person who has been severed might not lose his or her will to live if there was sure and certain knowledge that the severing can be reversed.

Con’s

1. It violates at least one (if not more) ancient law(s) that has probably been in place since the Trolloc Wars, if not since the founding of the White Tower.
2. Most sisters (not just the Hall) consider very old laws to “contain an aura of holiness,” and “consider changing such laws to be unthinkable.” [Robert Jordan, A Crown of Swords, page 219]
3. The act is excruciatingly painful and would probably be considered cruel and unusual by the standards of the White Tower.
4. The severed party might suffer irreparable psychological damage.
5. There is insufficient information regarding the restoration process.
6. Alternative methods exist to prevent prisoners from channeling.
7. Alternative (albeit not very humane) methods exist to foreswear oaths.
8. Alternative methods are favorable because they do not put an “innocent” party at risk. Anyone can be put to the question after they are found guilty and severed.


I know it was a long-winded argument, but I hope it helps put some things in perspective. Obviously there are situations and circumstances that would call for exceptions, and Semirhage (being one of the Forsaken) is certainly foremost among them. My argument only really holds weight when dealing with people who come under inspection by sisters like Pevara, or when applying some of the proposals that Lelaine and Romanda try to issue during the beginning of ACoS, where there isn’t sufficient evidence to prove the guilt of the offending party or the party is due to some kind of trial.

Sisters who have mountains of evidence heaped against them might call for exceptions on a case by case basis, but altogether I can see why it doesn’t fly with most of the characters in the books.

What do you think?