Andalite Calendar and Dating system, and religion.

[Yarin]

Think again is right

[anijen21]

The andalite homeworld has 4 moons

[Darth Revan]

Really? Where did it say that? THBC?

That's a lot of moons, and some crazy tides.

So again, who know how fast they go around, how close they get, how often are they in the same area of the sky?

When you have too many variables, mathematics can't be applied. Sorry if I put a bee in your bonnet.

[anijen21]

In the Andalite Chronicles, Elfangor says something like "when all four moons are in the sky it's almost as bright as day."

And I don't think the Andalite homeworld has that much water, so the tides might not be a big deal. I was always more interested in how their binary star system works.

[Darth Revan]

Nope, there's no mention of the Andalite moons in TAC. I just scanned it. It's probably in a diff book, like Visser, or THBC.





If you follow this link, you'll also see that the planet has more than one sun. That'll change things considerably. Also it was Ax who said the "bright as day" quote.

[anijen21]

Oh yeah my bad, it was #8

and I have a question--Earth
has seasons because it's tilted a few degrees on it's vertical axis. Is there any indication that the Andalite homeworld is the same way? Do most planets tilt a little? Any astronomy buffs out there?

[voodooqueen126]

http://anificforum.10.forumer.com/viewtopic.php?t=363&start=160
watch how the calendar developed on this other forum, I wish I had found this forum much earlier as the people here are much more scientifically minded and involved.
The Andalite year thing comes from wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andalites

[voodooqueen126]

These are some of the replies from the other forum:
Walkatdog:
The Hork-Bajir Chronicles gives us several details about the Andalite homeworld and star system. I believe this was during the conversation in which the planets of the Hork-Bajir system were given names. The Andalite system has two suns that are yellow stars and that are close together ( a matter of a few thousand miles).
Vooodooqueen: This explains how the Andalites are able to have such a long year but still enjoy a warm climate (see below) Pluto has a very long year because it is so far away from the sun however this also makes Pluto very cold and lifeless, obviously Andal is closer in than Pluto but having two suns at the centre of the solar system (effectively acting as 1 big sun) means that the years are long but the climate still warm, any planet with a 365 day year would be closer in to the 2 Suns and would be hotter than Venus.

Walkatdog: When Elfangor first saw earth, he was surprised by the polar caps and asked if they were frozen Carbon dioxide. He was also surprised that humans would live anywhere that was cold. This indicates that the Andalite homeworld does not have polar ice caps. Since he was shocked by the amount of water on earth also, the Andalite homeworld must not have has many oceans. The migration of Antarctica to the south pole coupled with the perpetual tilt of the earth's axis allowed snow to accumulate on one pole and caused the last five million years of cycles between ice ages and warm periods (and caused the earth to always have polar ice caps.) Since there is likely to be land under one of the andalite homeworld's axis of rotation (poles) due to the much greater amount of land, there cannot be a significant tilt in the planet's rotation. Since the tilt is what causes seasons on earth, the same mechanism cannot cause seasons on the andalite homeworld.
Ax said that there were few meadows on earth where an andalite can live. The location of the Anamorphs is probably southern California, a relatively stable environment that is decently warm. This is in agreement with the location of Edriss's initial landing and comments made by Applegate. The andalite homeworld would uniformly have a climate that is approximately like southern california.
Vooodooqueen: The mild tilt may cause milder seasons, a lack of seasons would be a monoclimate. This works, if Andalite seasons were as pronounced as they are in North America then due to the incredible length of the year Andalites would freeze in winter and dehydrate in Summer. To the mild seasoned Andalite the coldest midwinter solstice on which ever pole would be no colder than Melbourne in July, the Andalite would complain bitterly of the cold but the temperature wouldn't have dropped below -5 degrees at night and the frost would melt by midmorning...An andalite homeworld with pronounced seasons would be like the song of ice and fire.

[Darth Revan]

So that kinda screws up the whole Seasons and solstices and such, right?

[voodooqueen126]

In the Andalite Chronicles, Elfangor says something like "when all four moons are in the sky it's almost as bright as day."

And I don't think the Andalite homeworld has that much water, so the tides might not be a big deal. I was always more interested in how their binary star system works.

Since month is homophone with Moon, a month is basically to do with the moon... Since we have 1 moon our months are how many times we see the full moon (approximately gross generelisation) or 12 months per year. my hypothesis is that an Andalite month is how many times the 4 moons align in the sky each year or 10 times per year, though their year is 84 earth months.  One of the reasons I gave the Andalites a purely solar calendar (unlike the chinese calendar which was my main inspiration) is that Andalites are large herbivores with few oceans on their homeworld so they have neither the oppurtunity nor the inclination to be a maritime culture and therefore aside from the months no interest in the moon.
in reply to Yarin: mild tilt=mild seasons.
As for the holidays being intune with nature: most of the people on this forum have a western background which is to say monotheistic in origin, one of the main aims of monotheism is to avert the worship of nature. It is thought that  the creation story in Genesis is a 'take that' to polytheistic/nature worship religions and their creation stories, God, in 7 days and absolutely no effort created the sun and moon, ocean and trees that polytheists worship. Pre christian European, pre-islamic Middle East  and modern Asian festivals were/are in tune with nature. Indeed this irritating propaganda website criticises Christian festivals for not being intune with nature: (ignore we are so lovely stuff and read their critique of festivals being a commeroation of historical events rather than natural cycles.
http://www.hinduwisdom.info/Nature_Worship.htm
As for the months being called things like 'wet month' and how undignified that is... well advanced cultures like the Japanese have flower month, water month, frost month etc
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_calendar
I think the andalite months would've originally been called after natural phenomena like for example 'month of Est flower' because the est flower only flowers in that month. But as the Andalites moved on to inhabit the whole of their planet (moving from say the northern hemisphere to the southern hemisphere as happened on earth or vice versa if they started off in the southern hemisphere and moved north) month names would have changed from localised nature phenomena to things that are planet wide 'Election month' teacher month or Small moon month or Altair and Vega Month etc... to incorporate the expansion of Andalite populations. Or they could keep their localised natural phenomena and apply it to everybody (like we do on earth) for instance April is the month in which flowers begin to open in the northern hemisphere and April word comes from Aperire in latin to open... But April is the end of autumn in Australia etc. Plus christmas is the midwinter solstice when it is the midsummer solstice here:( This causes confusion.

[voodooqueen126]

I was able to email micheal grant (with the calendar attached) and his reply is thus:
"....I wish we could contribute something to it... We were writing ANIMORPHS at a pace of 14 books per year -- regular, Megas and Chronicles.  In some ways it's like working on an assembly line in that there's no time to slow down, no time to second-guess.  Every 30 days we needed to produce another book, plus the long form books.  When Katherine was delivering our son I was in a dark waiting room at 2 am writing book #11.  When I was down with flu she carried the load.  We kept up but barely.

The point being that it was less about careful planning and more about improvising.  We'd come up with something for a particular book and have almost no memory of it three books later.

So the truth is we simply don't have any answers.  You know more about it than we do."""
I guess since there is no canon on this issue, what particular questions could we break this calendar down into to and then just ask for M and K a quick "word of author statement" that they could make up on the spot in much the same way that JK Rowling added Dumbledore's sexuality and a lot of other things after the Deathly Hollows was finished.  http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WordOfGod

[anijen21]

Your work on this is beyond awesome, and on behalf of everyone I thank you for all of your time and effort.

I totally agree that seasons/holidays/names of months would be nature-based: even if all of the Christian holidays are supposed to be a take-that to pagan sun worshippers or whatever, Christmas still falls close to the winter solstice despite the fact that Christ was probably born in October, and Easter is suspiciously close to the first day of spring, with a holiday that is entirely about rebirth.

Having said that, I know this is an answer people hate hearing, but I think grant is right. Rowling got more than 10 years to flesh out seven books. Applegrant got about 5 to flesh out 60. Both fans and creator have acknowledges the inconsistencies in the series, and when we get to so detailed a level of scrutiny, I really start to think that there's no way to account for everything unless we start making stuff up. Which I don't really think is a bad thing. That's why it's my favorite fandom

[wildweathel]

As for the holidays being intune with nature: most of the people on this forum have a western background which is to say monotheistic in origin, one of the main aims of monotheism is to avert the worship of nature.

Well, I can't speak for all monotheistic religions, but Catholic Tradition at least splits the definition of "worship" into two parts: sacrificial worship, latria, which is due to God alone, and non-sacrificial worship, dulia, appreciation of--not service towards--created persons and things.  In other words, things are a bit more complicated, and it's not fair to say that monotheists ignore nature entirely.

Pre christian European, pre-islamic Middle East  and modern Asian festivals were/are in tune with nature. ...

Catholicism has four seasonal feasts that roughly coincide with the start of the seasons:

(northern-hemisphere)
Winter: Nativity of Our Lord ("Christmas," "Yule")
Spring: Paschal Triduum ("Easter")
Summer: Pentecost ("Whitsun")
Autumn: Christ the King (following the Second Vatican Council, also "Catholic New Year"--prior to that, Exultation of the Holy Cross / "Holyrood")

Pentecost is earlier than the solstice, and Easter always slightly later than its corresponding equinox.  They move around so that the Paschal Triduum be commemorated for three nights under the first full moon of spring.  Yes, really.  "Not in tune with nature" and all that.  

As for the months being called things like 'wet month' and how undignified that is... well advanced cultures like the Japanese have flower month, water month, frost month etc
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_calendar

Modern Japanese month names are boring things like "five-month" ("gogatsu") and "ten-month" ("juugatsu").  The older names are mostly limited to poetic use.

But, don't forget the days of the week.  The seven day week derives from astrology: there are seven visible non-stellar objects: Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn, in the classical order, the source of all sorts of modern silliness.  

Thus, the classical Latin names of the weekdays are things like 'Day of Saturn."  

Germans translated these names, substituting their gods for the Greco-Roman ones.  English follows this pattern: "Sun-day," "Moon-day," "Tyr's-day," "Oden's-day," etc.

The Hebrew calendar numbers the weekdays: Day 1 through Day 6 and Sabbath Day.  Christians renamed Day 1 the "Lord's Day" but otherwise kept the same pattern.  Most European languages combine Christian names with the Roman ones: "Lord's-day, Moon-day, Mars-day, etc."

Greek astrology also migrated to China, where, like the Germans, the Chinese changed the system to fit their own names of the seven astronomical objects.  The Chinese used names like "water star" for Mercury (Probably still do.  The Japanese do.  This system reached Japan by the Heian era (roughly 1000 AD) and is used today in Japan.  (China now uses numbered weekdays.  How boring.)

I think the andalite months would've originally been called after natural phenomena like for example 'month of Est flower' because the est flower only flowers in that month. ...

Or, they might not use months at all.  Traditional Chinese and Japanese calendars divide the year into the Twenty-Four Terms (Japanese "nijuu sekki") based on the Sun's position against the celestial sphere.  This system existed alongside the lunisolar calendar and was especially useful for agriculture.  Now, it's mostly for scheduling festivals and the like.

[Darth Revan]

Again, these are all based on human understandings and human tendencies. Andalites are far from human. There's no way to guess what they would worship or respect.

Over 8000 years, It's more likely that they've created actual names for "months" and "days". Yes, Japan and China are nature worshipers, but they're given names too. However since we have no extended translation guides, I think it would just be best to stick to your mathematical calendar.

[voodooqueen126]

well the whole reason i put this up, is help with the discrepancy between chapter 1 and 2 of HBC.
Like I said modern andalites have fairly boring names for months and such like but older poetic names (similar to weathel's japanese example) would be things like flower month...
My intuition about Andalites is that they are very nature conscious and if they worshipped anything, it would be nature.


Arabic, Hebrew and some extreme  Presbyterians call the days of th week after numbers, I don't think the desire to avoid polytheism is a bad thing so when I say that monotheism is supposed to avert nature worship it is not a criticism, Hindu wisdom was critical but aside from the interesting way of looking at things it is still a very irritating website.