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Astronomy of Planetos: Children of the Dawn, Part One


LmL

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Dont know if this has been brought up. The Maiden made of light and the lion of the night had a son. But for me it dosent make sense that God on Earth is the child of an actual Sun. So which persons represent the Maiden and the Lion?

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No one who can answer this ?

The Maiden of Light is the Day Sun, the Lion of Night is the Night Sun. I broke this down in detail in Fingerprints of the Dawn, the section on religion of the Dawn. As for their child, the God emperor, I mostly interpreted that to stand for the idea of the garden of Eden, when all was in harmony. Day and Night sun are in balance, so there is peace on earth. Apart from that, I'm not sure how to interpret the idea of him ascending to the stars, except in the sense that Dothraki calls are thought to do.

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The Maiden of Light is the Day Sun, the Lion of Night is the Night Sun. I broke this down in detail in Fingerprints of the Dawn, the section on religion of the Dawn. As for their child, the God emperor, I mostly interpreted that to stand for the idea of the garden of Eden, when all was in harmony. Day and Night sun are in balance, so there is peace on earth. Apart from that, I'm not sure how to interpret the idea of him ascending to the stars, except in the sense that Dothraki calls are thought to do.

Yes. But it dosent make sense that God on Earth is the son of two suns , or im i totally wrong ?

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Yes. But it dosent make sense that God on Earth is the son of two suns , or im i totally wrong ?

The child of a proper day/night balance. The key is balance of opposites. When day and night were balanced, ice and fire were balanced, male and female, sea and storm, etc. But eventually these balances were all disrupted by the act of pulling down on of the gods (goddess) from heaven.

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To build on my post from page 11 about the Ice Prophecy, that is, the idea of AA reborn destroying the ice moon, we have this:

Dareon and Sam left with him. They descended to the yard in silence. Outside, Jon looked up at the Wall shining in the sun, the melting ice creeping down its side in a hundred thin fingers. Jon’s rage was such that he would have smashed it all in an instant, and the world be damned. “Jon,” Samwell Tarly said excitedly. “Wait. Don’t you see what they’re doing?”

Jon turned on him in a fury. “I see Ser Alliser’s bloody hand, that’s all I see. He wanted to shame me, and he has.”

Dareon gave him a look. “The stewards are fine for the likes of you and me, Sam, but not for Lord Snow.”

“I’m a better swordsman and a better rider than any of you,” Jon blazed back. “It’s not fair !”

[...]

You’ll be as close to him as his shadow. You’ll know everything, be a part of everything … and the Lord Steward said Mormont asked for you himself !

Blazing Jon, the comet, AA reborn, is considering smashing the wall. The icy wall and the icy moon are analogous to one another; and in the other scene, he throws a pillow at the wall when it bursts into a "flurry" of feathers. Almost like he was trying to smash that wall.

And remember that other Jon chapter (heh heh) where he's claiming the skirling pass, and the wall is broken by a finger of ice? Here we see a hundred fingers of ice, the Wall melting, and Jon thinking of smashing it.

Voice, what say you?

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The child of a proper day/night balance. The key is balance of opposites. When day and night were balanced, ice and fire were balanced, male and female, sea and storm, etc. But eventually these balances were all disrupted by the act of pulling down on of the gods (goddess) from heaven.

So God on Earth is a union of ice and fire , that means that the Dawn emperors have ice blood and that Dany have a little bit ice blood too? I tought the unique thing about Jon was that he was the first union of ice and fire .

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So God on Earth is a union of ice and fire , that means that the Dawn emperors have ice blood and that Dany have a little bit ice blood too? I tought the unique thing about Jon was that he was the first union of ice and fire .

The balance was destroyed long before the Targs took a surname and rode dragons. So Dany would have predominantly fire blood, with only a trace--if any--of ice.

Jon may be the first balanced union of fire and ice in several millenia.

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So God on Earth is a union of ice and fire , that means that the Dawn emperors have ice blood and that Dany have a little bit ice blood too? I tought the unique thing about Jon was that he was the first union of ice and fire .

Not exactly. The MOL and LON represents balance of opposites, generally speaking. Ice and fire is merely one example of this principle in action.

The lion of night represents the night son, the sun in the underworld, or just the darkness in the night. It's a bit of an abstract concept. So I can't rule out an ice association, but it's not implicitly there. We don't know what those demons from the gray waste really are. I remain open minded.

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Not exactly. The MOL and LON represents balance of opposites, generally speaking. Ice and fire is merely one example of this principle in action.

The lion of night represents the night son, the sun in the underworld, or just the darkness in the night. It's a bit of an abstract concept. So I can't rule out an ice association, but it's not implicitly there. We don't know what those demons from the gray waste really are. I remain open minded.

I can get on board with God on Earth being a union of day and night . And i think the LON Demons are something else than the the Others. But since he is God on Earth , do you think he might be the first human ?

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Not exactly. The MOL and LON represents balance of opposites, generally speaking. Ice and fire is merely one example of this principle in action.

The lion of night represents the night son, the sun in the underworld, or just the darkness in the night. It's a bit of an abstract concept. So I can't rule out an ice association, but it's not implicitly there. We don't know what those demons from the gray waste really are. I remain open minded.

I was thinking the Maiden Made of Light is the moon actually, based on all the info we have about moon symbolism in the series. And the Lion of Night would be the sun, which works in a way: for one thing, the light of the moon is actually the sun's light reflecting off of it; for another, when the sun goes down, that's when it's night. When the lion sleeps, it is night and that's when the Moon Maid shines. The ancient properties of sun and moon correspond to old gender roles, and it fits with the Dothraki terms of endearment and their story of how dragons came to be.

It would just be odd to have the sun be male and the moon female throughout the series, but have them reversed in the Geodawnian Empire.

The demons are spiritual hoovers, sent to clean up the disgusting mess the kids have been getting up to. Or the baby sitters from hell, sent to scare the living daylights out of them (no pun intended). Hey, have you ever seen Serenity? The demons could just be like the Operative. Not specifically good or bad, just doing their jobs. However it's worth noting that the judgment or whatever you want to call it, of the Long Night came out of the North, as proven by GRRM's statement that Westeros got the worst of it because they are farthest North. Plus we know the Others come from the North. The Others could be Operatives who somehow got frozen when some kind of heat source (in Asshai?) was destroyed. Just typing out loud now.

Lack of light = lack of heat, thus cold, thus ice. There's the connection for the LON in your theory.

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Lady Blizz, I am copying and pasting from my third essay here.

------======o))) RELIGION OF THE DAWN (((o======------

Working off of the general premise that the Bloodstone Emperor, usurper of the throne of the Great Empire of the Dawn and founder of the Church of Starry Wisdom, corrupted the magic and knowledge of the GEotD, it's likely that astronomy and or astrology was practiced there, or even a part of their religion. I've also connected "casting down the true gods" with the casting down of the second moon, the eighth wanderer, so the "true gods" of the GEotD may very well have had something to do with the celestial bodies. Of course most ancient peoples on earth were adept astronomers and viewed the forces of nature as and heavenly bodies as divine - Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, ancient Chinese and Vedic cultures, Mayans, Incas, and other Native American populations, Celts, Persians, Sumerians, Babylonians, many cultures whose names are lost to history and many more whom I haven't named. When you think about it, it would really be quite strange if the GEotD religion wasn't rooted in astronomy to some extent.

The one bit of lore from the Great Empire that we do get is the legend of the Maiden-made-of-Light and the Lion of Night, who were once in harmony and gave birth to the first God-emperor, who was simply called the "God on Earth." He reigned for a thousand years and then ascended to the stars to join his forebearers. Working backwards, we see the concept of the stars as the final resting place of dead souls, or stars as the dead themselves, which we've seen in a couple of places on Planetos. That's certainly a "religious" idea rooted in astronomy and veneration of the stars.

The idea of a god descending to earth is a very common element to religious mythology around the world, so that's hardly distinctive. It does however fit with George's use of Morningstar deities (as we saw in part 2) and "Corn Kings / sacred bulls." This descent of the God to earth is usually followed by a golden age, as it is here.

The Maiden made of Light and Lion of Night are more interesting. The Lion of Night has people confused so far - the Lion is always the sun in these analogies, but here the Lion is night associated, while the sun seems to be this Maiden Made of Light. It doesn't make sense for the Lion of Night to be a moon, if only because there was two moons back during the time of the GEotD. I've always had a feeling that this Lion of Night is still connected to the sun somehow, perhaps as some kind of dark sun (cue the Soundgarden). During the Long Night, the Lion of Night was said to have "come forth in all his wroth to punish the wickedness of men" as the Maiden made of Light "turned her back on the world." I think that is a good description for the darkened sun as it would have appeared during the Long Night. Remembering something similar in the Biblical book of Revelation, I searched for and found this, as well as similar quote from Matthew:

Revelation 6: 12: When he opened the sixth seal, I looked, and behold, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth, the full moon became like blood, 13: and the stars of the sky fell to the earth as the fig tree sheds its winter fruit when shaken by a gale; 14: the sky vanished like a scroll that is rolled up, and every mountain

and island was removed from its place.

Mat 24:29: The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from the sky, and the heavenly bodies will be shaken.

Obviously that's some pretty similar imagery to my idea of the Long Night brought on by meteor impact: stars falling, the earth shaking, the sky no longer visible, mountains and islands removed, and most of all, a dark sun. Notice the wording: the sun "became black," and "become darkened."

Having a vague memory of some kind of night sun deity, I went looking on the internets and found an excellent one, the Mayan Jaguar God of Terrestrial Fire, sometimes known as Ak'b'al or Akbal (which means 'night'). The Mayans have several concepts of solar deities, as does Mesoamerican myth in general, but the concept of the Jaguar God of Terrestrial Fire is that he is the form the sun (Kinich Ahau) takes on his nightly journey through the underworld - the Night Sun. The notion of terrestrial fire - volcanoes, torches, incense burners and fire rituals - is connected to the notion of Akbal as a nocturnal or subterranean sun (the fire under and on the ground: terrestrial fire). Thus he is known as the jaguar god of the underworld, somewhat akin to a Hades or Osiris figure. There one other Mayan deity associated with the underworld, but isn't particularly relevant here.

Akbal, the night sun, is the black jaguar, while Kinich Ahau, the daytime sun, is the yellow jaguar, and both are seen as a necessary part of life. This is a highly dualistic concept which runs through most of mesoamerican myth. The underworld was a necessary part of life and rebirth - a notion clearly in harmony with George's cosmology in ASOAIF. Akbal, as the night sun, represents the "flame in the darkness," and he's also seen as the guardian of the dawn, when night gives way to day. Both of these concepts reflect the notion of the underworld as part of the cycle of life - gestation and rebirth.

This Night Sun deity also seems to have some kind of connection to a star, but Mayan myth is not well understood and it's hard to have clarity on many things. Akbal is however definitely seen as the Mayan war god, and his fearsome dark jaguar visage was often seen on their warriors shields. He is also associated with the number seven.

The Black Sun concept pops in most mesoamerican myth, including the Mexica (Aztecs). They believed in two suns, the young Day Sun and the ancient Dark Sun. The dark sun, on its nightly passage through the underworld, was associated with the butterfly, which is of course a symbol of transformation and rebirth, and may have been viewed as the original female mother deity, representing the womb and the tomb both.

Things get really scary when we consider the utterly terrifying Aztec deity named Itzpapalotl, the "Obsidian Butterfly." Don't be fooled by the term butterfly - this is a black butterfly with obsidian claws on its wings and an obsidian knife for a tongue. She's sometimes depicted as a kind of bat, as bats are sometimes called "black butterflies." Itzpapalotl is one of the tzitzimime, female star deities (some say demons) who were believed to descended to earth during solar eclipses and... well... devour people. They also had a role protecting the divine feminine and women in childbirth, to be fair - they were powerful and terrifying both. The Mayan dark sun deity Akbal may be married to the Jaguar Goddess of Midwifery (with both of them being war gods), a similar concept. Giving birth and war are both bloody affairs requiring great sacrifice (sometimes the ultimate sacrifice) - another idea that resonates with the themes of ASOAIF.

An obsidian-clawed bat creature isn't that far from a dragon, particularly considered obsidian's magical nature as frozen fire in the Martinverse. In Mesoamerica, obsidian mirrors were used by shamans for sorcery, another relevant connotation. Associations with stars as well as death and childbirth all line up pretty well with Daenerys and the lore around the destroyed fire moon, original mother of dragons.

While we are briefly examining mesoamerican myth, it should be noted that the Aztec underworld had nine layers, with the first level being earth's surface, and the entrance to the underworld from the surface was - and you're going to like this - the face of a gigantic toad which devoured the dead and have access to the other eight levels. I'm not sure what to make of the huge greasy stone toad statue on the Isle of Toads or if it is connected to the GEotD, but perhaps this is a clue as to its nature.

Stepping away from the Mayan and Aztec myth, I discovered one other bit of "night sun" lore which George may have been thinking of with his "Lion of Night as dark sun" concept. In the interest of not butchering this with paraphrase, here's an excerpt from sacredtexts.com :

"At midnight I saw the sun shining with a splendid light." The midnight sun was also part of the mystery of alchemy. It symbolized the spirit in man shining through the darkness of his human organisms. It also referred to the spiritual sun in the solar system, which the mystic could see as well at midnight as at high noon, the material earth bring powerless to obstruct the rays of this Divine orb. The mysterious lights which illuminated the temples of the Egyptian Mysteries during the nocturnal hours were said by some to he reflections of the spiritual sun gathered by the magical powers of the priests.

Some pagans and hermeticists believed the sun that we see in the sky is actually reflecting the light of this "spiritual sun," visible at night to the adept. This may give insight as to how the Lion of Night may have been associated with a source of "starry wisdom" to the sorcerer-king Azor Ahai, the Bloodstone Emperor.

We spent several paragraphs there exploring the admittedly freaky concept of a Night Sun, so what about the Maiden Made of Light? A female solar deity? Isn't the sun usually a man, man? Well no, actually, sun goddesses are all over the place - too many to count, really. The rising sun of the Japanese flag is the Shinto solar goddess Amaterasu, head of the Japanese pantheon. Hathor, a very ancient Egyptian solar deity / cow goddess and goddess of the sky, is an interesting one we will mention in the upcoming moon goddess extravaganza that is Part 4 or 5 or something. The Egyptians also have Bast, lion goddess of sunset, whose is symbolized as the fertilizing Rays of the sun, and Sekhmet, who represents the destructive qualities of the sun.

Earlier forms of Medusa had her as a solar deity. There's a Phoenician solar goddess named Shapash, "torch of the gods," who was able to travel through the underworld (no surprises there). Australian Aboriginal sun goddess Wuriupranili who lit a torch and carried it through the sky, east to west. Coming to the sea, she extinguished her torch in the water but used the embers to guide her way through the underworld.

Perhaps the most famous of solar goddesses is the Celtic Brigid. She is the the sun goddess and the fire goddess, and is associated with light and inspiration. Aditi is the Hindu solar Goddess who has a fairly important title - "keeper of the light that illuminates all life and ensures consciousness." That's probably a good place to stop, as I think that last one nicely encapsulates the Maiden Made of Light.

You may notice that many of the cultures where we find female solar deities are very, very old. This is a reflection of the global shift away from matriarchal societies to patriarchal ones which occurred few thousand years ago. The very oldest statues of any god-form to found anywhere in the world are mother goddess statues, pregnant, with heavy breasts to signify fertility and procreation. Thus, it makes perfect sense for George to choose a feminine deity to personify the daytime sun in the case of the Great Empire of the Dawn, with its implications of gender equality or even elements of matriarchy. It's notable that many places in Essos tend to be less patriarchal and more gender-equal than Westeros, which may be a remnant of GEotD culture. Furthermore, I find it highly fitting that Daenerys seems to be the last hope for righting this ancient wrong committed against the Amethyst Empress and the fire moon. I do believe Westeros may have a healthy dose of empowered femininity heading it's way, with characters like Daenerys, Brienne (the beauty), Arya, Sansa, Melissandre, and Arianne poised to shape the outcome of A Song of Ice and Fire. And can we get some more Asha Greyjoy, please? Please?

Bringing these two idea together, we have a religion that is consistent with the basic moral tenet of Planetos - balance of opposing forces, or dualism. There IS right and wrong - “right” is these forces in balance, and “wrong” is an imbalance. These ideas are well known to most ASOIAF readers and do not need further elucidation here, but its certainly no surprise to find that “in the beginning,” we find that the sun, high god of all gods, has a dual nature in balance - the Maiden Made of Light and the Lion of Night, whose perfect union leads to the presence of divinity on earth and a golden age. The stars are the repository of ancestral wisdom, glittering like the spark of the divine inside in eyes of every incarnated soul.

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Thats just great , LmL!

Have you watched the documentaries about the Nazis and their occult actions? There is no proof for this , but many belive that their was a cult called Vril society which wanted to harvest the great power of Vril , and it is said that Vril came from a black sun , the spiriutal sun. Many of the Nazis actually belived in the black Sun and maybe even worshipping it. A lot of this is probably not true , but who knows. Anyway my point is that the Cult of starry Wisdom is something similiar to the Vril society , they want to use the great powers of the black Sun.

About Lion of night demons and the Others. My proof that the Lion Demons are not the Others are that in the deserts which is very hot at day is actually very cold at night. It's cold , but there is now winter or ice. So the LON is probably something else than the Others .

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I think maybe the biggest clue to be taken from the grey wastes and the idea of the LoN having demon hordes that press on the borders is this: there may be a force from the earth itself or perhaps from the hearts of winter and shadow which creates monsters in its proximitely. Others rise near the HoW because it's cold there, while near the shadow, different kind of monsters are created. It seems to be something like that - it's kind of saying, "look, we have the same types of problems over here that you guys do." The "walls" in the east were fused stone, a fire building technique. The Wall of Westeros is built with ice magic construction. Some think the Oers built the Wall.... Maybe the old GeoDawnian fused stone masons live in Carcosa?

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Or perhaps the Wall of Westeros is fused stone at its base (definitely considered this for a long time anyway), and it's covered over in ice because of the climate there. But it's interesting to apply the same questions of who built it and why to the five forts, isn't it?

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Thats just great , LmL!

Have you watched the documentaries about the Nazis and their occult actions? There is no proof for this , but many belive that their was a cult called Vril society which wanted to harvest the great power of Vril , and it is said that Vril came from a black sun , the spiriutal sun. Many of the Nazis actually belived in the black Sun and maybe even worshipping it. A lot of this is probably not true , but who knows. Anyway my point is that the Cult of starry Wisdom is something similiar to the Vril society , they want to use the great powers of the black Sun.

About Lion of night demons and the Others. My proof that the Lion Demons are not the Others are that in the deserts which is very hot at day is actually very cold at night. It's cold , but there is now winter or ice. So the LON is probably something else than the Others .

The Nazis made a horrific mockery out of many important esoteric concepts which have existed for thousands of years. That's probably all we need to say about them... They got a hold of some occult ideas and applied their particular brand of twisted thinking and perversion to it. A real mess. Some ideas are simply very powerful; like a sword or chemistry or anything else that can cause great good or great harm.

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The Nazis made a horrific mockery out of many important esoteric concepts which have existed for thousands of years. That's probably all we need to say about them... They got a hold of some occult ideas and applied their particular brand of twisted thinking and perversion to it. A real mess. Some ideas are simply very powerful; like a sword or chemistry or anything else that can cause great good or great harm.

What i was trying to say is that imo the cult of starry wisdom can be very similiar to the so called Vril society .

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Does this religion qualify for tax exempt status? Might want to look into the potential savings of registering this as an official cult.



If Jon is the first combo-blood entrant in this race for 1000 years, a good reason for that needs to be installed to explain why the two magic bloodlines never spotted each other before and got the idea in their heads to hook up and bang out a combo magic superbaby to inherit the universe. They should have had that idea independently of the maesters, who it seems were required to play matchmaker behind the scenes in the last generations as part of the agenda of hitching north and south couples to ensure the magic bloodlines crossed paths. History should include a strong cautionary tale that kept ice away from fire prior. Uh, maybe aligning themselves with elements did that all by itself, maybe Ice people naturally hiss at fire people and vice versa. But then why did Rheagar have such a strong compulsion to put his peanut butter in Lyanna's chocolate? In their case something sure overcame any natural repulsion they felt and replaced it with attraction. Maybe those blue flowers have magnetic inversion properties and flipped the elements' natural distrust over into lust. Yes. Something did. Or else we'd have to face the reality that the bloodlines themselves have no aversion to each other and would have always humped it up, given the opportunity------which would mean the entire world has been conspiring so as to prevent them from having that opportunity to hump, by way of isolating them as far from one another as possible. Until.... the pervy maesters had a cloistered meeting where they decided to buck the trend and make a fire and ice love match.


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