Flinn's Healing

[lou]

Yeah, they got rid of every group who wouldn't submit to the Tower

 

please reference which groups it is that the tower got rid of. the only group that i know of is the male channelers, for obvious reasons. otherwise it would seem that the only other known groups of channelers, the windfinders, the wise ones, the kin, were pretty much going about business as usual, up until rand, at least.

 

for the record, for all of flinn's remarkable ability, he was no more able to heal rand's wounds than nynaeve was. what he did, instead, was contain them.

[CUBAREY]

There were several groups of wilders mentioned by name that were dispersed bythe White Tower. The impression I got was that over the centuries many groups of wilders sprouted up but the White Tower destroyed each one (except the knitting circle).

[BrainFireBob]

um, lou?

 

There's repeated references, not only in the BWB and Glossaries, to the fact the Aes Sedai routinely disbanded every non-Tower associated group of channellers they encountered.

 

I quote, "the last such group was the Daughters of Silence, a group of wilders trained and assembled by two failed Accepted"- I believe from CoT, but I am not certain. They are mentioned several times, as one of the members of the Black Ajah hunters is the only member of that group of wilders to have attained the shawl- Searin, I think is her name, the Brown with the curved knife- who was a slow learner. Either because she was held back for indoctrinary reasons, or because she was suffering the two weave limitation, IMHO.

[Mr Ares]

lou, my comments referred to the Westlands, the only place with Aes Sedai (so-called or otherwise) reign supreme. I explained why other channeling groups remained in existence. Sea Folk and Aiel are both more regimented societies than the Westlands, with a specific place in those societies for channelers. When the Tower was formed, not all  the women calling themselves "Aes Sedai" came running, and other groups were wiped out or incorporated. That's the reason why out of all the countries the only overt channelers were AS from the Tower - wilders knew to keep silent, because they would either be dragged of to the Tower for "training" or disciplined for possibly giving someone the false impression they were AS. The only named ones I can remember were the Dughters of Silence referenced by BFB. And he's right, it was Saerin who achieved the shawl.

 

http://encyclopaedia-wot.org:8008/organizations/daughters_silence.html Check here for more info.

 

ETA: krelianzg, in KOD Ny Heals Rand's arm after Semi's attack, but she doesn't do anything to his eyes. So she can affect only parts of a body. I'm sure there are other examples.

[krelianzg]

ETA: krelianzg, in KOD Ny Heals Rand's arm after Semi's attack, but she doesn't do anything to his eyes. So she can affect only parts of a body. I'm sure there are other examples.

 

I stand corrected - haven't re-read KoD since it first came out.

[aevogt]

The very first impression I have from the books goes back to my first reading of

TEOTW back in 1989, when god and I were both young.

 

The White Tower - An Ivory Tower (likely because I was in college at the time)

 

An Ivory Tower is defined as, and I'll heist from wikipedia here as it's as good a definition as any "...a world or atmosphere where intellectuals engage in pursuits that are disconnected from the practical concerns of everyday life."

 

That is exactly what I get from Jordan's descriptions of the White Tower and those who live there. 

 

The prevailing attitude engendered by the White Tower is that if you're not of the tower, you are automatically less than an initiate.  It is one of their greatest weaknesses.  In other societies, channelers are part of the very fabric of the cluture (specifically wise ones and windfinders)  The Aes Sedai are apart, in an ivory tower of their own making.  There is a scene where Alanna (I think it was her in TSR) tells Perrin "there are things that would burn any mind but Aes Sedai" Big fat hairy deal Alanna, get over yourself already.  Even Egwene has let it go to her head, though she still has a chance to bring to tower back into the world, as it was in the AOL.

 

To the point,

 

Damer has been trained in an environment where students are pushed to the breaking point, if not beyond, from day one, specifically to weed out the weakest links.  In the White Tower, they study history (my own discipline) logic, medecine, how to gentle/kill men who can channel. In the Black Tower, they appear to study how to kill with the power, how to kill with a sword and how to kill with their bare hands.  The healing they learn is an afterthought in the event they are injured. 

 

Dashiva may not necessarily have helped or instructed Flinn, but he did act as a Forsaken sounding board (much like Asmodean did for Rand)for Damer's ideas regarding healing, even though he has no feel for it himself, which I don't really believe.

 

Sumeko is a better healer than any AS because she has had several hundred years to perfect her craft (even though learning is outlawed amongst the Kin) without the constraints offered by the Tower.  Just because the Tower believes that "women put out of the tower forget about using the power" doesn't make it true, not by a longshot. 

 

 

[lou]

the daughters of silence is a bad example as the "founders" were two former accepted, women who already had ties to the tower. remember in TDR when egwene went through the accepted trials, at the end the amerylin formalizes her new position by saying "you are sealed to us now".

if you are looking for supression i would look to tear or far madding. i think what the tower does is more along the lines of a monopoly.

[yankee]

Moraine mentions that she speculated about channelers in the Waste and after she discovered that a good deal of Wise Ones can channel she states that there will be Aes Sedai coming to the ways to look for them.

She says the same thing about the Windfinders

The White Tower did not do anything about those groups since the Aes Sedai did not know about them. And Moraine seems to believe that the Aes Sedai will actually do something about those groups.

 

The existence of the Kin was known to the White Tower, but not its dimensions. The Kin have enough members to rival the White Tower and the Aes Sedai that were in Ebou Dar were very surprised when they found out. If it were not for Egwene it would not have been absurd to think of a war between the Kin and the White Tower :-D. Actually the White Tower would win the war since most of the Kin would just submit themselves to the Aes Sedai, but it would have been a good deal of trouble anyway ;-).

[Mr Ares]

I stand corrected - haven't re-read KoD since it first came out.

We all forget some of these details sometimes.

 

Even Egwene has let it go to her head, though she still has a chance to bring to tower back into the world, as it was in the AOL.

Strictly speaking, the Tower wasn't founded until after the Breaking. That said, I agree with you.

 

the daughters of silence is a bad example as the "founders" were two former accepted, women who already had ties to the tower. remember in TDR when egwene went through the accepted trials, at the end the amerylin formalizes her new position by saying "you are sealed to us now".

if you are looking for supression i would look to tear or far madding. i think what the tower does is more along the lines of a monopoly.

The founders of the DoS were two girls who had been put out of the Tower. When they tried teaching people for themselves, the group was shut down, the 2 were punished, and their students were enrolled at the WT, with only one achieving the shawl. That certainly sounds like an example of rival channeling groups being suppressed, at least to me. They do indeed have a monopoly, but how did they get it? Tower history lesson in brief: After the Breaking all channeling women were Aes Sedai. In the Westlands, those AS had many different groups. Some of the largest formed the WT, and over time other groups were dragged in. Essentially, they made it so the only women with the AS label did so by being joined to the Tower. After that, other groups arose with names other than AS. The same thing happened to them as to the DoS. They were broken up, enrolled as novices until the Tower was satisfied they wouldn't kill themselves (and happy with their indoctrination). It's like a saying a criminal organisation has a monopoly, but omitting that they got one by very hostile takeovers of their rivals. All AS came through the Tower, anyone who didn't was a wilder, and wilders are not deserving of much respect is the attitude the AS have, and they got it by taking out every other group of AS, and by taking out every wilder or organisation of wilders who dared to stick a head above the ramparts. The Kin were useful and invisible to the world at large, so they survived.