Astronomy of Planetos: The Solar Cycle and the Three Attempts to Forge Lightbringer

[LmL]

You've got it pretty well, as far as I am concerned. The idea of Rhaegar representing the first forging works very well - he's a dragon that died in the water. My idea of the first water forging would be the comet when it gains its first tail (blue and white, the usual color of comets) and begins to break up a bit and shed some meteors... with one of those being the Dawn meteor. Thus even though this comet (Rhaegar) is headed for collision, his offspring gives us hope for the dawn.

If the three Targs represent the three forgings -

Rhaegar + Lyanna = Jon

Aerys & Joanna = Tyrion

Aerys & Rhaella = Dany

​Confining the metaphor to Rhaegar as the sun king, we see him take a fire bride - Elia - and then a ice bride - Lyanna, just as the sun takes the fire moon to wife first (the first LN), and may well take the ice bride next (the idea the red comet will hit the second moon very shortly).

The patterns play out over and over, with every generation. Since Rhaegar is the sun king fertilizing two moons, his union with Lyanna represents the sun fertilizing the ice moon to produce a new lightbringer - this is who Jon is. He is Azor Ahai reborn, but in an icy sheath.(He's armored in black ice in his dream of holding a red fire sword). Last time, a sun comet fertilized a fire moon to make fire dragons, but Jon's mother is the ice moon. That's why Jon is the Prince Who Was Promised - because he represents the offspring of the "promised" sexing between the sun and the remaining moon. Thus, I expect the comet to strike the ice moon, and for this to have a direct magical effect on Jon, perhaps timing with his resurrection or his attainment of a new level of power.

ETA: and then we'll know that I am not crazy. Won't that be a relief! Unless....

[LmL]

And then the pattern repeats: Jon, as the son of a sun king, is "AA reborn," and thus takes his own (kissed by) fire bride.. and I wouldn't be shocked to see him take an ice bride, at least symbolically. Most likely, Val. She's an ice queen when she is described in ADWD.

[Han Snow]

Since Rhaegar is the sun king fertilizing two moons, his union with Lyanna represents the sun fertilizing the ice moon to produce a new lightbringer - this is who Jon is. He is Azor Ahai reborn, but in an icy sheath.

How does this make sense? You say that Rhaegar having a child with Lyanna produces Lightbringer to immediately follow it with Jon is AAR. So is he Lightbringer or AAR? How can he be both?

sun comet fertilized a fire moon to make fire dragons

Does that mean BSE killed his sister AE with his seed (childbirth)? Was their offspring the infamous Azor, the fire champion? So BSE was not suppose to fuck his sister and have a baby with her but with someone else? Did he got it right the second or the third time? By bringing forth little COTF/human children eventually and starting House Stark? BtB the original Lightbringer. Or was it Azor (son of BSE and AE) who did it? My own old old theory (LH being a Dayne=Geodawnian=AA who went North with his pale sword) That would mean that BSE is NOT AA and AE is NOT Nissa. Cotf princess of sorts being the Nissa = "helpful elf" seems more likely to me.

And then the pattern repeats: Jon, as the son of a sun king, is "AA reborn," and thus takes his own (kissed by) fire bride.. and I wouldn't be shocked to see him take an ice bride, at least symbolically. Most likely, Val. She's an ice queen when she is described in ADWD.

My bet would be Dany and Arya. One for duty, other for love. (IceFire125's idea) I like Val, I just don't see her surviving for too long, she is just another surrogate for Arya.

[LmL]

How does this make sense? You say that Rhaegar having a child with Lyanna produces Lightbringer to immediately follow it with Jon is AAR. So is he Lightbringer or AAR? How can he be both?

Does that mean BSE killed his sister AE with his seed (childbirth)? Was their offspring the infamous Azor, the fire champion? So BSE was not suppose to fuck his sister and have a baby with her but with someone else? Did he got it right the second or the third time? By bringing forth little COTF/human children eventually and starting House Stark? BtB the original Lightbringer. Or was it Azor (son of BSE and AE) who did it? My own old old theory (LH being a Dayne=Geodawnian=AA who went North with his pale sword) That would mean that BSE is NOT AA and AE is NOT Nissa. Cotf princess of sorts being the Nissa = "helpful elf" seems more likely to me.

My bet would be Dany and Arya. One for duty, other for love. (IceFire125's idea) I like Val, I just don't see her surviving for too long, she is just another surrogate for Arya.

It makes sense because every child is his parents, reborn. That's what is going on here. Obviously, nobody thinks we are talking about literal reincarnated souls. We are talking about bloodlines, and archetypal roles. Jon is both Lightbringer, the fruit of AA & NN, but then in turn becomes "AA reborn" and has his own NN. I mean, I THINK. We're still feeling this out.

I am 100% that AA = BSE and AE = NN. But to follow the model, the AA and NN union should also produce some sort of child. This child is likely your LH / Dayne, and that is probably where the name "E;drioc Shadowchaser" comes from. As I discussed in my essay, the precedents of "Eldric" are an Elric Stark, two Edric Starks, Edric Dayne, and Edric Storm. At the least, "Eldric" sounds Westerosi.

While we were unpacking the chapter where Davos smuggles Edric Storm away, chases the shadows form the King's Chamber, and has a shadow like a sword, we came across the seeming implication that AA had a son who turned against him. Since making this discovery, I have begun to see more evidence for this general idea. It's till in the fuzzy hypothesis stage, but it seems to fit. The whole point of the Dayne's look is that they must descend from the GEotD, specifically the Amethyst Empress or one of her family who has the same eyes.

We know AA / BSE killed the Am Em, so how did she have a child? Must have occurred prior to her death. Did she die in childbirth? That's probably more detail that we are supposed to get. I think the point with the Lightbringer myth is that it has two sides - murder and usurpation on the one, and sacrifice and procreation on the other. This is what we see with Rhaegar, who seems to be the model. So to with the astronomy - the sun killed the moon, but dragon meteors were "born." What nice children! RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!!!

[Han Snow]

You've repeated a lot of what I already know and tend to agree with. But okay.

"Blood betrayal" sounds incest-y to me. AE/Nissa dying in a "bed of blood" aka childbirth because her brother got her pregnant would be very GRRMish.

[Durran Durrandon]

You've got it pretty well, as far as I am concerned. The idea of Rhaegar representing the first forging works very well - he's a dragon that died in the water. My idea of the first water forging would be the comet when it gains its first tail (blue and white, the usual color of comets) and begins to break up a bit and shed some meteors... with one of those being the Dawn meteor. Thus even though this comet (Rhaegar) is headed for collision, his offspring gives us hope for the dawn.

If the three Targs represent the three forgings -

Rhaegar + Lyanna = Jon

Aerys & Joanna = Tyrion

Aerys & Rhaella = Dany

​Confining the metaphor to Rhaegar as the sun king, we see him take a fire bride - Elia - and then a ice bride - Lyanna, just as the sun takes the fire moon to wife first (the first LN), and may well take the ice bride next (the idea the red comet will hit the second moon very shortly).

The patterns play out over and over, with every generation. Since Rhaegar is the sun king fertilizing two moons, his union with Lyanna represents the sun fertilizing the ice moon to produce a new lightbringer - this is who Jon is. He is Azor Ahai reborn, but in an icy sheath.(He's armored in black ice in his dream of holding a red fire sword). Last time, a sun comet fertilized a fire moon to make fire dragons, but Jon's mother is the ice moon. That's why Jon is the Prince Who Was Promised - because he represents the offspring of the "promised" sexing between the sun and the remaining moon. Thus, I expect the comet to strike the ice moon, and for this to have a direct magical effect on Jon, perhaps timing with his resurrection or his attainment of a new level of power.

ETA: and then we'll know that I am not crazy. Won't that be a relief! Unless....

Hey, if We all open The Winds of Winter and the comet hits the moon and Jon is resurected, you officially win the Internet.

[LmL]

You've repeated a lot of what I already know and tend to agree with. But okay.

"Blood betrayal" sounds incest-y to me. AE/Nissa dying in a "bed of blood" aka childbirth because her brother got her pregnant would be very GRRMish.

Yes I agree, this makes a lot of sense. It's just hard to know what George is saying here. The reign of terror sounds consistent with a murder as opposed to childbirth death, but the procreation aspect is important too.

You can interpret the sun killing the moon as a blood betrayal and a murder, or you could look at it as the moon took a bullet for the earth, which would be a sacrifice. It's intended to be a metaphor with a dual nature, which makes interpretation very confusing.

[LmL]

Hey, if We all open The Winds of Winter and the comet hits the moon and Jon is resurected, you officially win the Internet.

I would expect that towards the middle or climax of Winds. Words are wind, and Winds will have many words. Jon may only get a couple dream sequence chapters for a good chunk of the book... I wouldn't be surprised. Of course one of those dreams will probably reveal RLJ.... If he wakes up and he comet hits, yes, I will win something.... An immense sense of gratification, for one thing. But, the comet may not be his resurrection. It could be some other meaningful event connected to Jon. The first question is, did Barristan see the comet returning at the end of ADWD? That question should be answered in short order. Another thing which should either happen or not in Winds will be Brienne's sword taking fire with red and black flame. That would be just as sweet.... Of course I haven't unveiled my dark Lightbringer essay yet... That's basically going to be my favorite essay. :devil: :devil: :devil:

[LmL]

Just found a major bombshell influence for the Azor Ahai / Lightbringer myth. Everyone should go read "The Nightingale and the Rose," which is a very short, but very well known, short story. It's a bullseye. Nightingales and roses (Rosie) feature prominently in the Alleras apple-splitting chapter from AFFC (prologue), which I used as a proof of the astronomy pattern in my very first essay.

Must read... then come back and discuss.

http://voicesinthedark.com/content.php?iContent=311

[LmL]

*cough* ahem, *cough*

You really need to get read that short story. It has the three forgings of Lightbringer in it. And it's very good.

[Han Snow]

If GRRM drew inspiration from that story then humanity is truly doomed in ASOIAF. WW's win. The end.

Nightingale's touching sacrifice served nothing in the end. (AE, Nissa, Lyanna...) The rose aka Lightbringer is just thrown away, cast aside, left for dead (Jon staying dead because scum murdered him and scum (asoiaf humanity) doesn't deserve to be saved?).

But yeah the similarities are there. Three forgings, the sacrifice, heart and soul given into the Rose/ Lightbringer.

Beautiful story in any case. Wilde was a great writer.

What is your take from it?

[LmL]

Well, first off, yes, I really thought the story was beautiful. I think the theme of trying to buy love applies to Pate here, who's trying to buy Rosie's "love." As for the ending of the story, I think it's a case of Martin drawing inspiration from the themes and symbols but not necessarily the outcome, like most of his myths. Ragnarok is a great example - the guy who has the website about that theory has done a ton of awesome work, but IMO took it too far by predicting that ASOIAF must end the same way, which led to him concluding Tommen was the PTWP who would be King at the end.

As for this story, I think it shows something about sacrifice. Azor Ahai was trying to forge a weapon, and he killed his wife to do so. In my opinion, this can only be a terrible act, and the weapon created, a monstrosity. This parallels Daenerys's use of unwilling sacrifice to give life to her dragons - terrible, monstrous weapons. I'm not saying Daenerys necessarily meant to sacrifice Drogo and Rhaego, but neither of those two nor Mirri Maz Dur sacrificed themselves willingly. Of course you know I don't think Nissa Nissa gave her life willingly either. Call me a moralist, but I do not think we can get heroic weapons through murder and blood magic. I think the dragon are every bit the menace that the Others. At least, I should say, "dragons in the hands of sorcerers." I don't think dragons in the wild a big deal, they're just carnivores in that case, right?

I think that laying down your life so that someone else might live is noble. The nightingale did this, sacrificing herself in a labor of love. However, the target of her love was unworthy, and ungrateful, just as the target of HIS love was unworthy and ungratefull. To me, the lesson of that was that for love to really bloom, you need two people willing to lay down their lives for each other. The student wrongly comes to the conclusion that love is worthless, because the object of his affection turned out to be shallow and unworthy. But the real problem was that he was not worthy or grateful for the gift of ultimate, true love. Some say love is blind, and if so, perhaps you can't fault the nightingale for misjudging the worthiness of this young lad. But the point remains, real trajedy was the lack of appreciation for the sacrifice. The student should have kept the rose, if he truly appreciated the Nightingale's sacrifice, and found a worthier recipient. When someone sacrifices themself, you have to honor it in whatever way is appropriate.

Truly, the story is a bit paradoxical and confusing. I typed a lot of sentences and then erased them trying to answer your question. I've been turning it over in my mind the last few days... It seems there are multiple interpretations of its meaning out there. I definitely think it tells us something about the nature of sacrifice, which is an important theme in ASOIAF, but I can't say I understand it perfectly by any means.

[LmL]

I noticed that in the Nightingale and the Rose, it's the sacrifice herself who works to forge something, whereas in the AA story it's AA who is forging a weapon, and sacrifices someone else to do so. Not sure if that's a significant change or not, but if it is, it kind of implies that you sa fire yourself to do something noble, you don't sacrifice other people. If AA had tempered the blade with his own heart to make a weapon for someone else, perhaps I'd be inclined to view him as a hero. But just look at Mel, with constant obsession with sacrificing people (children) to work magic. I just don't think that's going to lead anywhere good. It would be fitting if Mel realizes this and sacrifices herself to resurrect Jon or do something noble...

[LmL]

The first time they passed an elephant, Tyrion could not help but stare. There had been an elephant in the menagerie at Lannisport when he had been a boy, but she had died when he was seven … and this great grey behemoth looked to be twice her size.

Farther on, they fell in behind a smaller elephant, white as old bone and pulling an ornate cart. “Is an oxcart an oxcart without an ox?” Tyrion asked his captor. When that sally got no response, he lapsed back into silence, contemplating the rolling rump of the white dwarf elephant ahead of them.

Volantis was overrun with white dwarf elephants. As they drew closer to the Black Wall and the crowded districts near the Long Bridge, they saw a dozen of them. Big grey elephants were not uncommon either— huge beasts with castles on their backs. And in the half-light of evening the dung carts had come out, attended by half-naked slaves whose task it was to shovel up the steaming piles left by elephants both great and small. Swarms of flies followed the carts, so the dung slaves had flies tattooed upon their cheeks, to mark them for what they were. There’s a trade for my sweet sister, Tyrion mused. She’d look so pretty with a little shovel and flies tattooed on those sweet pink cheeks. (ADWD, Tyrion)

A white dwarf, also called a degenerate dwarf, is a stellar remnant composed mostly of electron-degenerate matter. A white dwarf is very dense: its mass is comparable to that of the Sun, and its volume is comparable to that of the Earth. A white dwarf's faint luminosity comes from the emission of stored thermal energy.^[1] The nearest known white dwarf is Sirius B, 8.6 light years away, the smaller component of the Sirius binary star.

A white dwarf is very hot when it is formed, but since it has no source of energy, it will gradually radiate away its energy and cool. This means that its radiation, which initially has a high color temperature, will lessen and redden with time. Over a very long time, a white dwarf will cool to temperatures at which it will no longer emit significant heat or light, and it will become a cold black dwarf.^[6] However, the length of time it takes for a white dwarf to reach this state is calculated to be longer than the current age of the universe(approximately 13.8 billion years),^[10] and since no white dwarf can be older than the age of the universe, it is thought that no black dwarfs yet exist.^[1][5] The oldest white dwarfs still radiate at temperatures of a few thousand kelvins.

The companion of Sirius, Sirius B, was next to be discovered. During the nineteenth century, positional measurements of some stars became precise enough to measure small changes in their location. Friedrich Bessel used position measurements to determine that the stars Sirius (α Canis Majoris) and Procyon (α Canis Minoris) were changing their positions periodically. In 1844 he predicted that both stars had unseen companions:^[15]

If we were to regard

Sirius

and

Procyon

as double stars, the change of their motions would not surprise us; we should acknowledge them as necessary, and have only to investigate their amount by observation. But light is no real property of mass. The existence of numberless visible stars can prove nothing against the existence of numberless invisible ones.

Bessel roughly estimated the period of the companion of Sirius to be about half a century;^[15]C. A. F. Peters computed an orbit for it in 1851.^[16] It was not until 31 January 1862 that Alvan Graham Clark observed a previously unseen star close to Sirius, later identified as the predicted companion.^[16]Walter Adams announced in 1915 that he had found the spectrum of Sirius B to be similar to that of Sirius.^[17]

[LmL]

The white dwarf manifests the Last Hero math - first we see one by itself, followed by a dozen more.

First we see a bigger version of the elephant, grey behemoths with castles on their backs. The smaller version is bone white and pulls an ornate carriage behind it. Could these be the two moons? Usually we get fire and ice imagery, which is lacking here, and usually the ice moon is white or crystal, and bigger, with the fire moon being smaller, and associated with fiery colors, like red or gold. But the binary star idea where the white dwarf is the smaller, darker sister to the main star sounds like, well, "dark sister," the smaller and darker moon. Sirius is deeply connected with Isis, who is the Egyptian form of the resurrecting goddess and who is of course associated with the moon. It is Isis who resurrects Osiris (a Morningstar deity) as lord of the underworld, and who gives birth to their child, Horus, who becomes the new solar king and also represents a reincarnation of Osiris. The idea of Isis being a lunar queen who is really a binary star - two stars, one bigger, one smaller - definitely sounds like a two moon thing.

The "is an oxcart an oxcart with no ox?" remark places the white dwarf in the position of the ox, or the bull - meaning, a sacrificial animal associated with the moon. At the temple of Aquan the red bull, a white calf is slain every 13 days... that's just to dip my toe into the Last Hero - white bull symbolism. Mithras has to slay the white bull, which becomes the moon, to be reborn.

The white dwarf's "faint luminosity" sure sounds like the sword Dawn, doesn't it?

The white dwarf is pulling an ornate cart - is this a comet's tail? Or is the cart the earth, and the white dwarf the moon, with their being locked together in orbit of the sun being represented by the image of the elephant pulling the cart.

White dwarf could refer to Tyrion, as he is tyne white lion in Dany's vision, he has the pale blond hair that is almost white, and he seems destined to ride vision, the white dragon.

Just found this this morning, so still trying to wrap my brain around this one... suggestions and thoughts would be welcome.