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Proof that Time in ASOIAF World is running in reverse; and implications for the Timeline


DaenerysWinsEverything

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 ASOIAF is loosely based on Medieval Europe + Magic. So, rules of cultural transmission that were true of Medieval Europe apply to ASOIAF except when Magic is a plausible explanation for why they don't apply.

 

We know that Magic is basically anti-science. So, it can't be subjected to logical analysis resulting in discovery of general and reliable principles that can be harnessed for technology. That's fundamental, and GRRM confirms it when he says we won't see Gods in ASOIAF, for example, or when he says none of the characters understand Magic.

 

The camp opposed to this in Westeros is the Maesters of the Citadel. In ADWD we have some hint that the Maesters are trying to create a scientific world by killing the dragons, the source of Magic in their opinion. This seems contradicted by the presence of greenseers, wargs, etc. before the Targ invasion, but who knows, maybe the presence of dragons anywhere in ASOIAF world are supposed to make Magic possible . . . although the very different cultural feels of Children Magic vs. Valyrian Magic makes me skeptical of that.

 

I instead argue that Maesters aren't wrong; rather, ASOIAF has multiple different historical timeframes going on. Because:

 

There is a general trend away from Magic in ASOIAF world at the opening of the series. Less Magic, not more.

 

There is very low Magic during the Lannister-Stark struggle south of the Wall; the dates are also reliable, kept by Maesters. Since Maesters represent Science, these dates are literal.

 

However, the farther back you go, the more Magic is present, and the more Magical the dating system becomes. So, symbolic OR mythical rather than literal/historical.

 

The question is, Can we point to a specific point where the dating system becomes historical?

 

For a certainty, everything recorded before the coming of the Andals in Westeros is Magical. We know that all the stuff about the First Men and especially about the Children is questioned by some of the ArchMaesters; it's on par with the stories about Leprechauns in Ireland. By contrast, Valyrian history is more like the Epic of Gilgamesh-esque records that exist, but are still symbolic, claiming stuff like kings who live for 60,000 years.

 

Andal records, on the other hand, belong solidly in non-Magical territory. Still could be inaccurate, but everything about Andal culture points to a hostility to Magic. The Seven are Catholic-ish, which means that even though Magic is acknowledged, it's Evil and Demonic. Hence the Andals destroy a bunch of the pre-Andali culture. The Citadel emerges from the Andals, replacing Alchemists just before the Targaryen Conquest, indicating a further step away from Magic. Alchemists try to harness Magic to technology, converting it into science. Real science, which has no use for Magic at all, emerges as the next logical step. This shows we're starting to move away from the Seven's view that Magic is real but Evil, and moving into Renaissance territory where Magic isn't where Westeros is going, and if it does exist it needs to die. We see somewhat similar developments in the Free Cities.

 

This affects the timeline in the following way: Andal dates can be treated as real history. Maybe inaccurate, but historical analysis of the records is possible.

 

Valyrian dates are Epic of Gilgamesh territory. There is probably some system to it, but it's not primarily historical. It's primarily symbolic/Magical/ahistorical.

 

First Men dates are somewhat more historical. They're like oral history, and fall mostly under the rules for interpreting oral histories. So, the Magical events there correspond roughly to supernatural events in oral histories. Basically, Something Happened At Some Point In The Past. Not a whole lot more accurate than that. Nearly worthless as history, but useful for what it tells us about their culture.

 

Children of the Forest are on par with Leprechauns in Ireland.

 

So that's where we stand at the opening of AGOT.

 

All of the above is stood on its head by Dany's dragons. That marks an end to the period of recorded history by reintroducing Epic of Gilgamesh stuff. But at least we are still dealing with human civilization which sort of harnesses the Magic to serve human rulers' interests.

 

The onset of the Long Night and confirmation within the story of warging brings an end even to symbolic history like that of the Babylonians because it resurrects completely non-human Magical elements with an agenda of their own. At least the dragons can be given a role in human society; the Others threaten the existence of humanity.

 

This means that ASOIAF is regressing currently. The high point of historical development has to be the period from the death of the last Targaryen dragons to the rumbling beginnings of the Long Night. Even if the Long Night is warded off, it will be by dragons; at minimum we'll be back to the Epic of Gilgamesh.

 

The real unanswered question in the series is, What triggered this? It's the opposite of what happened in human history, so GRRM better have a good explanation.

 

Why is time running in reverse?

 

 

 

 

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This was interesting to read on my smoke break at work but I have to be honest and say I don't follow you on some of it. I'm by no means saying your observations are wrong or baseless but I'm having trouble connecting a few of the dots - I'll give it another read later when I have more time though.

IIRC, the Maesters and Citadels predate the Andals, as mentioned above, if I'm wrong about this though, I can say with absolute certainty that they've been around MUCH, MUCH longer than "...[replacing the alchemists] just before the Targaryen Conquest..." If this were the case, it would put the Citadel at "just before" 1AC or just a bit older than 300 years.

If I'm missing something here or misunderstanding what you meant then by all means - my bad.
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This was interesting to read on my smoke break at work but I have to be honest and say I don't follow you on some of it. I'm by no means saying your observations are wrong or baseless but I'm having trouble connecting a few of the dots - I'll give it another read later when I have more time though.

IIRC, the Maesters and Citadels predate the Andals, as mentioned above, if I'm wrong about this though, I can say with absolute certainty that they've been around MUCH, MUCH longer than "...[replacing the alchemists] just before the Targaryen Conquest..." If this were the case, it would put the Citadel at "just before" 1AC or just a bit older than 300 years.

If I'm missing something here or misunderstanding what you meant then by all means - my bad.

I've read a lot of theories on this site, and I observed that most theorists view the novels as canonical, kind of like the Bible. All material is on the same level of canonical'ness'. Like the Protestant principle of the inerrancy of scripture, or something like that.

 

The purpose of this thread is to question that based on the internal evidence provided about the ASOIAF world. The core reason is that GRRM uses a blend of very different historical traditions in the novels. In real life, some of these traditions would be very reliable as history, and others would be almost completely unreliable because they aren't intended to be read as history in the first place.

 

So I think that we have to read ASOIAF like a modern scholar would read the Bible, rather than how a traditional Protestant would read it.

 

This means that we need to consider the novels to be a composite of several different source materials.

 

So different rules of interpretation will apply to different parts of the novels. For example, I think dates get thrown out the window except for a tiny slice of recent Westerosi history.

 

Carrying this to its logical conclusion, the symbolic aspect of the novels will trump the literal historical aspect increasingly as the series is 'regressing' into Epic rather than history. I think you can see that already as the role of the "three dragon heads" prophecy is coming to the forefront; the fantasy will increasingly overshadow the more historical 'realpolitik' world that we saw so much of from AGOT to AFFC.

 

If you want to imagine this spatially, civilization in ASOIAF is structured as a pyramid with three blocks. The top block, which we see first, is also the smallest and newest. That's the 'realpolitik' part. Beneath this is the 'Epic fantasy' block which contains dragons and Valyrians. At the base is the 'Primeval legends' block with Others, Long Night, and Wargs, etc. Different parts of this pyramid come to the forefront at different times in the chronology, but right now we seem to have reached the apex of the pyramid and are now moving down into the lower regions . . .

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Maesters and the Citadel predate the Andals.

Possibly . . . but I think it's open to question based on the lack of reliable records before very recent Westerosi history. And I'd say most early records are enormously unreliable because Magic meant that they weren't meant to be taken literally, only symbolically or mythically.

 

It makes sense for the Maesters and the Citadel to come into being along with the other similar developments in Westeros, like the religion of the Seven and the destruction of a lot of First Men stuff. The Citadel matches with this; it makes no sense as a development in the First Men culture, in either ASOIAF or in the parallels with Medieval Europe. The First Men being replaced by Andals represents a more sophisticated technological culture overcoming a less sophisticated culture.

 

So how would the most technologically advanced and non-magical group in Westeros, the Citadel, have emerged from the First Men instead of the Andals? When everything we know about the First Men suggests that their thought was conservative, Ned Stark-like . . . definitely not at the forefront in a scientific advance . . .

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I see your points, but what I don't see is how that equates to time running in reverse.


So, the assumption should be that ASOIAF is going from primitive to modern, in parallel with Medieval Europe. And we do see that until shortly before AGOT. But suddenly, it starts reverting back into the Magical past. That's time running in reverse.
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everything we know about the First Men suggests that their thought was conservative, Ned Stark-like . . .

That's certainly not true.

definitely not at the forefront in a scientific advance . . .

So you think the religious fanatics that carve symbols into their own flesh are the scientists?

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So, the assumption should be that ASOIAF is going from primitive to modern, in parallel with Medieval Europe. And we do see that until shortly before AGOT. But suddenly, it starts reverting back into the Magical past. That's time running in reverse.

No, that's progress running in reverse.  Time is continuing in linear fashion.  

 

Time running in reverse would have the characters getting younger all the time, and things like lava coming up out of the sea to drain through a hole in the top of a mountain, gradually making said mountain smaller until it finally disappears into the sea.  

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No, that's progress running in reverse.  Time is continuing in linear fashion.  
 
Time running in reverse would have the characters getting younger all the time, and things like lava coming up out of the sea to drain through a hole in the top of a mountain, gradually making said mountain smaller until it finally disappears into the sea.


That would be a rewind on a videotape. It would not be possible because while there was a 'push' mechanism to cause the action in the first place, for example a volcano erupting propelled the lava with force, there is no 'pull' mechanism to reel the lava back in. So in no causal universe can there be a rewind.

However, in human timescales there is a recognized order to how civilizations develop. Just as in the case of the total rewind, reversing this is a partial rewind, so impossible. However, GRRM uses Magic, which makes this a reversal and possible instead of a rewind and impossible.

Magic is not a mechanism, it allows you to do stuff which would be impossible because Magic. However, it keeps the universe causal by having a limited domain, outside of which ordinary causal mechanisms apply.

One of the things Magic seems to do in ASOIAF is mess with time. It does it most in Westeros, but through Valyrians it also seems to have stagnated progress in Essos. I would call what is happening now a reversal, others have called it a cycle. Either way, Magic has messed it up.
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I think I understand what you're saying.
I don't think I agree with you though, the appearance of magic doesn't have to be a reversal of time or progress.
Wasn't there a quote by Martin somewhere that says something about the appearance and decline of magic is a repeating cycle, somehow related to the prolonged seasons?

 

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Time has always moved forward in the novels. Bran gets to see into the past but and Brynden Rivers states, you can only see the past, not interact with it.  Magic returning has nothing to do  with time in the books. Magic is a force that unlike physical forces, waxes and wanes over time. It is returning now, but we really do not know a lot about the past so we are unable to say if magic has waxed or waned in the past 

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Westeros exists in a universe within the Level IV ensemble in which the time development operator of quantum mechanics is non-unitary, and Liouville's theorem doesn't hold. Perhaps dragons somehow affect the fabric of the multiverse or are interdimensiobsl beings that cause violations of unitarity or, through some other mechanism, cause branching dynamical trajectories within phase space. The masters are onto this.
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Westeros exists in a universe within the Level IV ensemble in which the time development operator of quantum mechanics is non-unitary, and Liouville's theorem doesn't hold. Perhaps dragons somehow affect the fabric of the multiverse or are interdimensional beings that cause violations of unitarity or, through some other mechanism, cause branching dynamical trajectories within phase space. The masters are onto this.

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Actually. I'm thinking about it- I still don't think you're exactly right, but I think there is a possibility of some kind of chance of some kind of time flux that makes history repeat itself.
Bran is able to view the past. but is told he can not change it.
We're coming up on a dance of dragons 2.0
The Long Night 2.0
A second Azor Ahai
All kinds of parallels with character's taking the same roles as people from the past.

I don't really believe it exactly. but it has given me something to think about

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You repeatedly say that the Children are like leprechauns, and point out that the Maesters doubt their very existence--but we see them first-hand. They're real, they're pretty much the same as described in the myths, and they've been hanging out for centuries, first scouting the land, then training Bloodraven. If you want to argue that some recent change brought them back, then everything Leaf and Bloodraven say to Bran is BS.

Also, do we really have any evidence that progress is running backward? It certainly doesn't seem to be in Essos, which is where the dragons are. Their progress over the past 300 years seems to be continuing apace, and they're facing issues that seem more renaissance-to-early modern (the growing power of banks, abolition of slavery, political ascendance of the bourgeoisie, etc.), not a return to early medieval issues.
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You repeatedly say that the Children are like leprechauns, and point out that the Maesters doubt their very existence--but we see them first-hand. They're real, they're pretty much the same as described in the myths, and they've been hanging out for centuries, first scouting the land, then training Bloodraven. If you want to argue that some recent change brought them back, then everything Leaf and Bloodraven say to Bran is BS.Also, do we really have any evidence that progress is running backward? It certainly doesn't seem to be in Essos, which is where the dragons are. Their progress over the past 300 years seems to be continuing apace, and they're facing issues that seem more renaissance-to-early modern (the growing power of banks, abolition of slavery, political ascendance of the bourgeoisie, etc.), not a return to early medieval issues.


So, the Children are real in a mythical text. They aren't real in a historical text, and probably are just irrelevant in an epic text. I argue that ASOIAF has all three kinds of text, and that these roughly correspond to the level of civilization. During the events in the novels, what we are seeing is the intermingling of all three layers. The more primitive seems to rising to the top.

As for Essos, that was true until the dragons. Dragons are not even Medieval. They are Epic. That is a regression by my definitions.

It could be my analysis is incomplete. My main goal is to point out the different levels of the story.
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Actually. I'm thinking about it- I still don't think you're exactly right, but I think there is a possibility of some kind of chance of some kind of time flux that makes history repeat itself.
Bran is able to view the past. but is told he can not change it.
We're coming up on a dance of dragons 2.0
The Long Night 2.0
A second Azor Ahai
All kinds of parallels with character's taking the same roles as people from the past.
I don't really believe it exactly. but it has given me something to think about


And you point out other things I didn't think of. I don't think I'm exactly right either. But I know it isn't as straightforward a timeline as people seem to think, either. The books are showing a seriously weird world that doesn't square with This Is Medieval Europe.
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