The Lucifer Comet

[Fun Guy from Yuggoth]

A few weeks ago I googled the phrase "lucifer comet" because I believe the theory that the sword Lightbringer is a Red Comet and the word Lucifer means "Lightbringer," and found this book called "The Lucifer Comet" and I just finished reading it, and sorry in advance for this summary being rather incoherent, the plot of this story is all over the place.

It is sci-fi mixed with mythology, mixed with time-travel.  The Lucifer Comet itself is a huge ball of ice with two gods trapped inside of it, traveling in a straight line towards Earth at a very high speed (a comet which is not in orbit around a sun, but being shot from one location to another, and a large portion of the book is devoted to back-tracing the path of the comet to find the planet from which it was launched).  Later we learn that a Promethean god named Quarfar launched it off the surface of the planet Dora by building up pressure below a polar ice sheet and blasting a chunk of ice off of the planet and hitting Quarfar (Prometheus) and his brother Narfar (Satan) and embedding them in the "space-time ice comet" (Quarfar uses his magical spear to facilitate this launching).  Narfar is an orange-furred bat-winged Neanderthal-looking creature, whereas Quarfar looks like a normal human, but they are brothers and their home planet is Mars and they are the last of their race.   Quarfar and Narfar like to bio-engineer planets, Quarfar likes to build technological societies, and Narfar likes animals and primitive human societies that do not use fire.  Narfar also goes by the name Narfareon.  They can both genetically engineer humans.

Narfar had established a primitive society on a planet called Dora, but his brother Quarfar learned of it and came to Dora to change the civilization to a technological one.  Narfar is sort of a mentally retarded child god, and he resolved to fight Quarfar over the right to rule over Dora and keep it as his personal fiefdom.  Quarfar shows up and launches the comet trapping them both in the comet for reasons that are never explained.

The comet is discovered 50,000 years later by the main character is Barathra Jeroboam Methuen who is a comet wrangler, who collects comets and takes them to Earth to use the water they contain.  (Methuen = Pro-metheus?)  He brings the Lucifer Comet to Earth, and they defrost the gods, and try to speak to them.  Narfar escapes and disappears, but they are able to communicate with Quarfar with the help of a 17 year old girl named Dorita who can read minds, and travel through time, (she is obsessed with doing things people tell her not to do, she is Pandora).  She learns that Quarfar and Narfar established civilizations on Earth 60,000 years ago, Narfar a Neanderthal one, and Quarfar a Cro-Magnon one.  The Cro-Magnon civ wiped out the neanderthal civ, and Quarfar banished Narfar from Earth and to the planet Dora--he launched Narfar off the planet.  Quarfar remained on Earth in spirit form and his spirit took over human bodies from time to time to guide human civilization.  The mythological figures of Satan and Prometheus were based on real god-beings that lived on Erth in pre-history.  There is a lot of talk about constellations, and that is how the humans discover the location of planet Dora, because it is located in a particular constellation that is shaped like Narfar. 

Methuen keeps having prophetic dreams about a catastrophic attack on human civilization that involves an unidentified space object hitting human colonies at a very high speed--comet-like.

Methuen falls in love with Dorita.  Quarfar's body dies.  Narfar finds Dorita and they hatch a plan to return to the planet Dora via a space-time tunnel that Quarfar established that links Earth to Dora.  They return to Dora and find that Narfar's civilization has completely collapsed and hardly a trace of it remains (he and Quarfar were stuck in the comet for 50,000 years, and his people could not survive without his oversight).  So, Dorita and Narfar go back in time 50,000 years to just after the comet was launched.  Narfar resumes rule over his people and he marries Dorita.  Quarfar had told her that there was a box in arctic polar region that she should not open.  So of course she demands that Narfar take her there.  She finds that Narfar has removed all of the intelligent humanoids on Dora from his civilization and imprisoned them in a crater in the arctic, along with hive-minded spiders that are big enough for a human to ride them.  Dorita frees these humans and their spiders. (this all happens 50,000 years in the past)

In the current time, Methuen leads an expedition to Dora to rescue Dorita and learn about Dorian civilization.  When they get there they find a deserted planet.  Due to Dorita going back in time and altering the past, time paradoxes begin manifesting, and several days later Narfar's neanderthal civilization appears overnight.  The author does a time-travel style that I have never seen before: lets say we have Person A and Person B in the current time, Person A goes back in time and waits a week then changes the timeline, the changes in the timeline only manifest to Person B after that week has elapsed--suddenly things around you can change, and in this story a hundred days after Methuen lands on Dora an advanced world-spanning technological civilization appears overnight, due to Dorita freeing the intelligent humans 50,000 years in the past.  Dorita dies in the polar north, Narfar is frozen in ice forever.  It turns out Quarfar's spirit was inside Dorita and that was what was compelling her to free the humans.  

So, the modern civ on Dora has intelligent telepathic hive-minded spiders coexisting in society with humans.  The spiders are a collective consciousness, and they retain the memories of their people, when a spider eats another spider they absorb all of their knowledge and memories, and the Queen of the spiders holds all of their collected memories, the new Queen is called Varji.  The spider queen is capable of time travel because the first spider queen Narsua ate a human that was hosting Quarfar's spirit.

Anyway, the book ends with the spider queen letting Methuen's expedition return to Earth, but it ends before they actually leave, and there is no follow up to Methuen's apocalyptic prophecy dreams, so we don't know what happens with that.  It ends with Methuen pondering which one of the gods is the mythological Satan.

There are hints in the story that Dorita became the planet/god of Dora and that maybe it had been named after her all along, because the planet is named Dora and she is Dorita which would mean "little Dora"--but this idea gets dropped.

Overall, I would give the book an A for interesting ideas, but a C- for turning those ideas into a coherent story.

 

------------------------

 

So what does this have to do with ASOIAF? 

I have been arguing for a while that the weirwood network has two gods trapped inside of it, who are engaged in a battle for control over the network.  This is the struggle between R'hllor vs the Great Other: R'hllor is fire and progress and technology and consumption, and the Great Other is cold and unchanging adherence to and preservation of the old ways.  And here we have two gods trapped within a Lucifer Ice Comet.  A comet named Lightbringer, with gods trapped inside of it, gods who are from Mars, and have been launching themselves from one planet to another.  And I have argued that the Red Comet originated from Mars, from a weirwood eruption that launched a grove of weirwood trees into space.  And here we have a Promethean god using a magical wooden spear to manipulate volcanic forces to launch an ice comet into space.  One of the gods is a god of progress and technology, and the other is a god of stasis and primitive life--and they are in conflict forever.  One of the gods is named Narfareon--in ASOIAF Neferion had something to do with the Long Night.  (Recall also, that Odin had a magical spear called Gungnir ("trembling, shaking") that never missed its target when thrown, and Bloodraven and Beric are both essentially Odin characters that sit weirwood thrones)

It is explicitly addressed several times that the planet Dora has no axial tilt, and therefore no seasons, the poles are always frozen and the equatorial region is always summer.  In ASOIAF I think the axial tilt is changing, that that is what is messing up the seasons.

On Dora in the arctic, there are giant spiders that humanoids ride.  These humans are imprisoned in the polar north--inside of a smooth-walled crater described as a wall--, and a god inhabiting a human's body tricks her into releasing them and when they are released they completely change the civilization on the planet--that is, they completely wipe out the existing civilization (she opens Pandora's box).  The spiders are hive-minded, and one is named Varji.  In ASOIAF, Varys is the spider, and I have been arguing that he is working with the Great Other (that is the voice he hears every night in his dreams) and getting info from the weirwood network from his child sacrifices.  When the new spider queen takes over she devours the old spider queen and absorbs her knowledge--"the new god devours the corpse of the old"

I have argued that in the future Bran's soul will jump out of his body and become a ghost in the weirwood, and has traveled back in time to occupy the bodies of people in the past to steer the course of events--that he was Peremore who founded the Citadel, and he was Bran the Builder, etc.  And in Lucifer Comet, Quarfar's spirit has occupied the bodies of select individuals in the past to steer the development of human society.  Quarfar has time-travel abilities also. 

There are a few name similarities, I already mentioned Narfareon / Neferion, and Varji / Varys, and the main character's name Barathra / Baratheon, and the alien planet is Dora/ Dorian / Doran (and I have argued that Doran Martell is the weirwood network).

When Narfar takes Dorita to the arctic they stop to look at a glacier that looks like the face of an "ice god."

When Dorita sees the craters in the Arctic:

"she strongly suspected that a volcanic eruption beneath the ice field might well have been the origin of the Comet Gladys which had brought Quarfar and Narfar to Erth."

"it seemed to be a crater . . . Dorita had queried: What that? --Narfar, curt: That where comet start.  Dorita: Comet that bring you to Erth?  It blow off here?  Surely affirmative.  I confirmed the Quarfar story, increasing her respect for Quarfar, who had with his spear evoked vulcanism violent enough to fire a huge chunk of ice into the air at the forty thousand kilometers per hour velocity necessary to clear Dorita's gravitational field."

The crater with the humans and spiders is nearby that launch crater, and it is hinted that it was a much more massive launch event, but this idea is never revisited.

The mentions of volcanic activity launching a comet has made me start to think that the Valyrian civilization may have been destroyed by their 14 weirwood groves exploding into space at the same time--and that Valyrian steel is a metaphor for a weirwood comet being forged.  And that would explain why magic diminished on Earth after the Doom--a large population of weirwoods departed the planet all at once.

 

In the Lucifer Comet they discover the source of the comet (the planet Dora) by careful study of constellations, in ASOIAF my theory that Mars was the source of the Red Comet and mythical Lightbringer Comet/sword was based on the analysis of the Three Forgings legend as mythology--and that the three tempering attempts: into water, into a lion's heart, and into wife's heart were references to constellations of the zodiac that comets where launched from, Aquarius, Leo, and Virgo.  And that something passing through these constellations was making "swords"--Mars is the Smith in ASOIAF, and the Smith makes swords, Azor Ahai was a swordsmith.  The Smith being in the Moonmaid was associated with taking women as wives, and Mars takes Virgo as his wife. 

In the Lucifer Comet, the comet is launched directly at Earth (Erth), and in ASOIAF, I think the Long Night eclipse was ended by the Lightbringer Comet being launched directly at Earth to knock the second moon out of eclipse formation. 

So, this book seems to support my theory that the Red Comet is/was a weirwood that contains "gods" and was deliberately launched from Mars to colonize another planet.  (similar to George's volcryn from Nightfliers)  It also lends support to my theory that the weirwood network contains the spirits of two gods that are at odds with one another, and they struggle for dominance within the network--one god that loves technology, and one god that hates it, and they use humans as pawns and playthings in their game.  The story ends with humans freeing themselves from the influence of these gods--one god is eaten, and the other is frozen in ice for eternity.

 

[Frey family reunion]

I’m not sure of all the business of Gods being in a comet, but for arguments sake, let’s assume that someone has called down a comet to scourge the planet.  Comets like planets don’t tend to travel in a straight line, in fact they orbit stars much like planets do.  So if someone were to cast a comet into the planet, it’s more probable that the comet would stop circling the star and begin orbiting the planet with an orbit that gets closer and closer to the planet with every pass.

in which case you would expect the comets sightings will become more frequent and the comet will look progressively larger after every pass...

[Fun Guy from Yuggoth]

6 minutes ago, Frey family reunion said:

I’m not sure of all the business of Gods being in a comet, but for arguments sake, let’s assume that someone has called down a comet to scourge the planet.  Comets like planets don’t tend to travel in a straight line, in fact they orbit stars much like planets do.  So if someone were to cast a comet into the planet, it’s more probable that the comet would stop circling the star and begin orbiting the planet with an orbit that gets closer and closer to the planet with every pass.

in which case you would expect the comets sightings will become more frequent and the comet will look progressively larger after every pass...

The Oort Cloud is a diffuse orbiting field of trillions of ice balls some 20,000-50,000AU from the sun, and every so often a gravitational disturbance from a nearby star will send one into the inner solar system, where the sun warms it and the ice is stripped away by the solar wind and develops a tail of ice vapor.  If they get caught by the gravity of the gas giants they become short period comets that go around the sun then out to about Jupiter and then back to the sun taking decades, or if not they are long-period comets that go around the sun then far out of the solar system, then back to the sun, sometimes taking millions of years. 

I am proposing the Red Comet is neither of these--it is not a normal comet, it is more akin to a rocket being shot from point A to point B in a straight line, rather than an ice ball that is in orbit around a star or planet.  I theorized this long before even discovering the book The Lucifer Comet, and it just so happens that in that book the Lucifer Comet is deliberately shot off of Planet A towards Planet B, for the express purpose of transporting a god from one place to another, in almost the exact way that I hypothesized, even sharing the same name.  In my opinion, that is pretty good confirmation.  (and in Niven's Lucifer's Hammer, an asteroid destroys human civilization)

(and again, George's volcryn were darkly telepathic space-faring creatures that telekinetically launched themselves from some spot in the center of the galaxy out in all directions to colonize space)

In Carl Sagan's book Comet, he devotes several chapter to the subject of comets hitting the Earth and causing mass extinction events.  And even about a mythological Red Comet (pg 178) and an apocalyptic dark sun that sends comets (pg 304) that brings a Long Night/nuclear winter (see my post on the Dark Sister and the Red Comet)  He mentions on page 51 that Edmund Halley believed that the Biblical Flood was caused by a comet passing too near Earth causing a massive tidal wave, and Halley believed that comets must occasionally hit the Earth, with catastrophic consequences. 

And in several places he mentions that early astronomers believed comets were coming from Jupiter:

page 94: "Some early astronomers thought this meant that Jupiter was the source of the comets, that they were somehow spat out, disgorged, from the inside of the largest planet."

And in one of Sagan's other books, Broca's Brain, he discussed comets coming from Jupiter and the pseudo-scientist Vsekhsviatsky:

page 114: "Laplace and other early astronomers hypothesized that Jupiter was the source of such comets . . .  Vsekhsviatsky, who seemed to believe that the moons of Jupiter eject comets out of giant volcanoes."

On pg 23 of Comet, he mentions the Aristotelian view of comets was that they were exhalations of gas from inside the Earth, ejected from the planet and then catching fire in the atmosphere.

So instead of comets coming from volcanoes on Jupiter, George has them coming from volcanoes on Mars.  

In 1973, the Comet Kohoutek was supposed to be a major event, and I have a pseudo-science book about it called Comet Kohoutek and the cover shows a comet passing by a total solar eclipse, because the comet was supposed to swing by around Christmas during a solar eclipse.

Almost the exact same image in Sagan's Comet, on pg 245

 

 

 

[Fun Guy from Yuggoth]

I have another book on comets that I have just started to read that I just happened to find at a used book store, it is The New York Times Guide to the Return of Halley's Comet (1985)

Apparently the astronomer Johannes Kepler believed comets were created "from the conjunction of the planets in one of the signs of the zodiac" (pg 52, another source for this quote ) and this is what I theorized the legend of the three forgings of Lightbringer story was about. (as well as Galladon wielding the Just Maid three times) 

Also it turns out many early astronomers believed comets traveled in straight lines and that they were launched out of planets:

Kepler believed comets traveled in straight lines. (pg21)

Galileo believed comets were "formed from material exhaled from the Earth" and that they traveled in a straight line. (source)

Tycho Brahe:  "Comets, he said, traveled roughly in a straight line." (pg 21)  In Sagan's Comet, talking about Tycho disproving Aristotle's view that comets were merely an atmospheric phenomenon he says "Tycho liberated comets . . . and allowed them to soar into space." (pg 32)

Astronomer Johannes Hevelius "reaffirmed the straight-line theory . . . Hevelius explained that comets were disk-shaped bodies flung out of planets." (pg 21)

Cassini believed that comets were "generated by chance accumulation of exhalations furnished by the planets and the stars" (source) he acknowledged that it appears that comets move in a straight line, but that is only because we see a short segment of their path. (source)

And I already mention Aristotle's belief that comets were some kind of vapor that rises out of the Earth and bursts into flame, and this was the dominant view for about 2,000 years.

More on the subject of comets being launched out of planets, on page 99-100:

Quote

French mathematician Joseph Louis, Comte Lagrange.  Perhaps, he said, the comets were blown out of the giant planets . . . As more and more comet orbits were calculated, the idea that at least some comets originate in Jupiter became more plausible since the aphelia of so many of them . . . were near the orbit of Jupiter.

The nineteenth-century proposal, as recounted by the British astronomer Patrick Moore, envisioned the great red spot on Jupiter as "a kind of supervolcano, puffing out comets regularly."

Then they discuss the soviet astronomer Vsekhsviatsky's theory that comets are thrown out from Jupiter's four inner moons. (pg 102), and another Russian guy Velikovsky who had the same idea.

 

I also found this English astronomer Richard Proctor, who theorized in 1873 in Cornhill Magazine (pg 51):

Quote

no resource seems open to us, but to believe that he (Uranus) expelled them from his own orb by some mighty eruptive action.  . . . The new theory is then simply this, that the streams or systems which produce displays of shooting-stars, as well as the comets with which such streams are associated, were at some distant epoch expelled from the interior of one or other of the major planets which revolve outside the zone of the asteroids

Same guy pushing his theory in other magazines: (source) (source)

So, it turns out that the idea of a planet launching a comet was not fringe at all, it was believed by some of the smartest people in history, and several unconnected people came up with the same idea in different centuries.  Weird.  The idea came to me in a dream last year, and I thought it was ground-breaking (pun intended).  In that dream, there was a weirwood grove on a very high hill above the clouds (like the High Heart), and it just blasted off into space with no warning--and I woke up with a start.  The weirwoods had been building up pressure below ground, and that was what formed the very high hill, the hill also makes it easier to reach escape velocity.

 

On the subject of comets causing massive catastrophes:

Halley "anticipated modern thinking that some of the Earth's most devastating catastrophes may have been caused by too-close encounters with extraterrestrial bodies.  Halley suggested, for example, that the Caspian Sea was gouged out by a comet impacting the Earth at the time of the Biblical Flood.  A comet coming too close to Earth or hitting Earth, he said, might have been the disrupting force causing the Flood." (pg 29) 

Newton also believed a comet caused Noah's Flood (source),

Newton's protege and close colleague, William Whiston, theorized that a large comet caused the Flood (same source)

Quote

This comet, he declared, had passed close to Earth thousands of years ago—so close, in fact, that the comet had doused our world with water from its tail and exerted enough gravitational force to pull forth oceans from beneath our planet’s crust.

In short, Whiston concluded, the same comet seen by incredulous sky-watchers in the 17th century also unleashed the epic rainfall and great Flood that had cleansed the Earth of sinners in Biblical times.

 

This hypothesis has come back around, there is some evidence that an asteroid or comet impacted the polar ice sheets some 12,800 years ago causing a global cataclysm, including massive flooding of coastal civilizations (called the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, source, source)  And before I knew of this theory, I argued that ASOIAF takes place on antediluvian Earth 12,000-14,000 years ago, based on the blue star Vega being the North Star and the Ice Age animals (mammoths, dire wolves, woolly rhino, aurochs, tasmanian tiger, etc), and that the comet will cause (or be contemporaneous with) a massive flood that will destroy human civilization. 

 

 

[ravenous reader]

On 9/13/2019 at 5:19 PM, By Odin's Beard said:

A few weeks ago I googled the phrase "lucifer comet" because I believe the theory that the sword Lightbringer is a Red Comet and the word Lucifer means "Lightbringer," and found this book called "The Lucifer Comet" and I just finished reading it...

You are incredible (I thought we'd cleared up the relevant etiquette previously, silly me...) -- So you 'googled' every 'Lucifer' and 'Lightbringer', and just couldn't bring yourself to cite @LmL and his comet theory!

Synchronicity, right..? 

I sea you. 

On 9/13/2019 at 5:19 PM, By Odin's Beard said:

It is sci-fi mixed with mythology, mixed with time-travel.  The Lucifer Comet itself is a huge ball of ice with two gods trapped inside of it...

That's like two greenseer rivals (perhaps one of ice and one of fire?) in the weirnet.

[Fun Guy from Yuggoth]

1 hour ago, ravenous reader said:

You are incredible (I thought we'd cleared up the relevant etiquette previously, silly me...) -- So you 'googled' every 'Lucifer' and 'Lightbringer', and just couldn't bring yourself to cite @LmL and his comet theory!

Synchronicity, right..? 

I sea you. 

That's like two greenseer rivals (perhaps one of ice and one of fire?) in the weirnet.

I thought it was clear that I was building on his theory, given that I used the phrase "lucifer means lightbringer" in my opening sentence, and I used the phrase "I believe the theory" and not "I have a theory."   I thought about inserting an @LmL but since he doesn't come here anymore I decided it didn't matter. 

I have been thinking a lot about you and the idea of being inside the weirwood network being "under the sea."

On page 103 of the NY Times Guide to Halley's Comet they compare Halley's comet to a sea creature lost in space:

Quote

"To use a marine analogy, it is as if Halley's Comet were a single organism such as a sponge or a coral that had never found its way to the larger colony and thus--tiny but still a complete being--it floats on and on in the celestial sea." 

I have argued that the weirwood is a kind of polyp, like the hydra, that it is a hive-minded creature that launches itself into space to establish colonies on other planets.  (see also the Medusa, the hive-minded telepathic creature from Sturgeon's The Cosmic Rape)

And George's Guardians the hive-minded mudpots have "green dreams" and being clams they are literally "beneath the seas."

And in Sagan's Comet, in chapter 10 there are a bunch of pictures of comets that look like starfish or corals,

And in Vance's Dragon Masters, the red star with an eccentric orbit that occasionally comes close to Aerlith is called Coralyne.

 

So with all this in mind, yesterday I re-listened to The Shadow over Innsmouth for the umpeenth time, and this line caught my attention:

Quote

"the children shud never die, but go back to the Mother Hydra an’ Father Dagon what we all come from onct—Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! "

When the fish-frog/human hybrid people get old they go into the sea to rejoin mother Hydra/Dagon/Cthulhu, where they become immortal--they are even called "children."  The fish people require regular human sacrifices be dropped into the sea, and if the sacrifices stop, then the fish people come out of the sea and kill humans.

In ASOIAF, the CoTF wear scales of woven leaves and one of them is named Scales by Bran--Old Nan says they can swim like fish, and Luwin says greenseers can control fish ("Even fish." he says).  The crannogmen are CoTF/human hybrids and they are frogs, and can breathe mud, they also wear scales.  The green men guard/serve the weirwoods.

Cthulhu/Mother Hydra is the weirwood, who is under the sea dreaming, the fish-frog/CoTF are its servitors, and when they upload to the network they go under the sea and become immortal. 

And in the World Book they point out that the Shrykes of Essos who are believed to be lizard-people might be people that wear lizard skins:

Quote

Whispers reach us of the Grey Waste and its cannibal sands, and of the Shrykes who live there, half-human creatures with greenscaled skin and venomous bites. Are these truly lizard-men, or (more likely) men clad in the skins of lizards?

So, this plants the idea that mythical fish people monsters could be beings that merely wear scales of some kind.  (And Shrikes are birds that impale prey upon trees)

 

 

[Sandy Clegg]

Quote

THE KORONIDES (Coronides) were two nymph daughters of the giant Orion. When the land of Boiotia (Boeotia) was struck by drought they voluntarily offered themselves up as a sacrifice to the gods, bashing out their own brains with shuttles. Persephone in pity then turned them into a pair of comets.

The name Koronides was associated with the Greek words korônis, "curving one" or "comet" and also korônê "the shuttle" and "crow."

https://www.theoi.com/Nymphe/NymphaiKoronides.html

Thought this belonged here. The words comet and crow seem to be connected in Greek, and even the Latin name for crow is Corvus corone (carrion crow to be exact.) They stem from the origin meaning of 'curved' - the shape of a crow's beak/claws being curved just as is the shape of a crown. 

Not sure what this adds to the theory, although it does bring crows, kings and comets neatly together. Perhaps only that if there are gods trapped  inside a comet, then they might take 'crow-like' form?