Empty Rituals
In Earthsea, the wizards’ magic is practical, concrete and solid, because it gets at the fundamental truth beneath the surface of the world. By harnessing true names, wizards come to understand their world more deeply, and can then affect it.
The power of the Kargad priestesses, however, is much more vague. It is ancient, but it is so secretive and buried, that one does not know what is truly at its core. In fact, a lot of the rituals the Kargad participate in seem mostly empty. Arha and the other priestesses sing “songs whose words no man understood” (60). And perform the same rituals over and over with no result obvious to the reader. One gets the impression that they act because they’ve been told that it has an affect, and whether they believe it or not, this is how it is done.
The idea of unbelief is interesting in that you wouldn’t find a wizard of Earthsea ceasing to believe in his power. The evidence is clear. However Arha ultimately realized “the existence of unfaith, and had accepted it as a reality even though it frightened her” (77). And this unbelief isn’t reserved for a clearly wrongheaded person either. Her friend, the gentle Penthe lacks true conviction in their cause. And of course there is Kossil, who “had no true worship in her heart of the Nameless Ones or of the gods. She held nothing sacred but power” (77).
If one so good as well as one so high up in the religion can posses unfaith, it casts doubt upon the entire system. One wonders if either it is all lies, or if there is a truer way to worship the Nameless Ones that has been lost.
A signal example of Arhu considering the emptiness of the religion she perpetuates, is when she sees the Undertomb illuminated for the first time. She has never brought light into the Undertomb because that’s what she had been told, and what she’d always done. When she does, she begs repentance, “yet even as she prayed, in her mind’s eye she saw the quivering radiance of the lighted cavern, life in the place of death” (89). She is realizing realizes how beautiful and mysterious the Undertomb is when illuminated. What if the space had originally been meant to be seen? How was she to know that the ritual of total darkness was any more honoring than light? All she had were the teachings of her predecessors who may or may not have been true believers.