Written in Uncertainty Questions: Recent Episodes

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The Skaal in BriefThe Skaal are a tribe of Nord-ish people that are unique to the island of Solstheim, off the north-east coast of Skyrim. They haven’t built large settlements in what we’ve seen of them, in what seems to be a lifestyle that is deliberately close to nature and is focused on hunter-gathering. They are quite insular, or at least they have been in some of their portrayals; by the time of the Fourth Era they seem to have loosened up a bit, but they also may be dying out.

Most particularly, they have a very different pantheon compared to most other faiths on Tamriel, that of worship of the All-Maker, and… well, not much else. This has led some people to say it’s effectively monotheism in Tamriel, but I don’t think that’s entirely the case. We’ll get to precisely why later.

Origins of the SkaalThe Skaal consider themselves a kind of Nord, although they are distinct from them. Precisely when and how they splintered from more mainstream Nords isn’t clear, and we have possibly contradictory information here. There’s the Bloodskal blade, present in a barrow in Solstheim, which feels like it should have something to do with the Skaal simply by the name association. However, we don’t have much beyond that. Gratian’s Journal notes that there are very few records of the Bloodskal clan, and they have draugr in their tomb, indicating a link with more usual Nordic culture at the time of the Dragon Cult, at least. It is possible that the Bloodskal clan were the ancestors of the Skaal, but we have little confirmation of that.

However, I think we do have some indication that the Skaal came from Atmora, at least, rather than leaving Skyrim for Solstheim at a later date. The location of the Skaal village, which didn’t really move or grow in the two hundred and seven years between the events of The Elder Scrolls III: Bloodmoon and The Elder Scrolls V: Dragonborn is on the northeast of Solstheim, which isn’t the most immediate place you’d settle if you were coming from Skyrim to the island. However, if we apply this logic to the Bloodskal clan, their tomb is on the southwestern side, exactly where you’d expect parties to land if they were coming from Skyrim. So it’s possible that, if we’re using the locations as a guide, the Skaal aren’t related to the Bloodskal.

However, we do have other connections between the Skaal and the Dragon Cult. The book The Guardian and the Traitor recounts a Skaal legend of Miraak, which notes that the Skaal remember “an age long ago when dragons ruled over the whole world and were worshipped as gods by men”. This would indicate that there is some cultural memory of the Dragon Cult among the Skaal, and indeed some overlap in events, as both Draugr and Miraak are present on Solstheim. The legend also points out that the Guardian, another dragon priest, was appointed to rule over Solstheim after the Traitor’s disappearance.

Given that, it feels like the Skaal would have the same origin point as the Nords in terms of coming from Atmora, having a totemic religion based on a pantheon of divine animals that then converged on dragon worship. Where they seem to differ is what happened afterwards, although there are some similarities, given their origin point.

Skaal ReligionSkaal & the Ancient Nordic PantheonGiven the point that the Skaal and the Nords diverged is after the Dragon Cult, they share the same origin in the old totemic faith that came from Atmora. It’s described like this in The Dragon War:

In the Merethic Era, when Ysgramor first set foot on Tamriel, his people brought with them a faith that worshipped animal gods. Certain scholars believe these primitive people actually worshipped the divines as we know them, just in the form of these totem animals. They deified the hawk, wolf, snake, moth, owl, whale, bear, fox, and the dragon.

Given the above, we can assume that the Skaal faith has similar beginnings in the totemic faith of the old Nordic pantheon. I think this then evolved into a more animistic faith than the mainstream Nordic faith, which moved each of the totem animals into the figures of the Nordic pantheon. Divines and the Nords explains it like this:

These animals—Dragon, Hawk, She-Wolf, Snake, Moth, Owl, Whale, Bear, and Fox—seem to correspond to the Eight Divines plus Lorkhan.

…

Eventually, the animal-totem gods transformed into the eight gods we worship today. We call them by their true names: Alduin, Kyne, Mara, Dibella, Stuhn, Jhunal, Orkey, and Shor.

In the case of the Skaal, this transformation did not happen. There are some similarities between the Nords and the Skaal, particularly when it comes to dragons being bad, which I’d personally put down to residual memories of the dragon cult. Put a pin in that, we’ll come back to it later.

In the case of the Skaal, the evolution went the other way round. Instead of the animals becoming representations of more abstract deities, the Skaal deified the natural phenomena around them. Or at least spiritualised it, if we go by Michael Kirkbridge’s word on the matter. In a forum post, Michael Kirkbride claims that “[t]he Skaal are animistic, not monotheistic.” It’s not immediately apparent what this means, I was inclined to disagree with that (although I’ve never thought of them as monotheistic), but there’s some interesting edges to a quote from Storn Crag-Strider in The Elder Scrolls V: Dragonborn:

The All-Maker is the maker of all things, and it is from the All-Maker that life flows like a great river. As all rivers must return to the sea, so all life returns in time to the All-Maker.

The same character also points out that the secrets of the Skaal that Hermaeus Mora is trying to steal in the DLC are basically ways to interact with the natural world, like the wind and sky and so on. With the attitude that all natural things come from the All-Maker, the Skaal are communing with the divine when they interact with the natural world. That is close to animism, which is the belief that natural phenomena have souls.

This leads to an interesting set of assumptions about how the world works - the Skaal don’t differentiate between people, animals and other things in the same way. For them, souls are more “stuff-like” than we typically think of the term. Everything is spirit, and so interacting with the wind and earth is interacting with the spiritual. I’d imagine that even something as banal as having crumpets and tea with a friend could have a spiritual component for the Skaal. This pervasive animism has big implications for how the Skaal see the world, and in particular the afterlife. Children of the All-Maker, which is written by a Nord and so may have both some misunderstandings of the Skaal culture and some shared background that could both make it easier for the author to understand and have some assumptions not mentioned in the text, puts it like this:

For the Skaal, the All-Maker is the source of all life and creation. When a creature dies, its spirit returns to the All-Maker, who shapes it into something new and returns it to Mundus. The concept of death as an ending to life is unknown to the Skaal. Rather, death is seen as simply the beginning of the next stage of an endless journey.

This feels similar to how the Argonians see the relationship to the Hist, particularly if you take some of Alandro Sul’sAncient Tales of the Dwemer at their word (always a bad idea) that “the Hist are where [Argonians] come from and where [they] are going”. However, the Hist are a conduit for a consciousness and experiences to be reformed as an Argonian and part of the overall Argonian-Hist relationship. What the Skaal believe is a more universal thing, that all things have spirits that are moulded into something else upon death. It’s closer to what Spinoza proposed for how substance works in his work Ethics. In brief, all the universe is one substance (substance being defined as “that which is in itself, and is conceived through itself: in other words, that of which a conception can be formed independently of any other conception”), with things fashioned into different modes (“the modifications of substance, or that which exists in, and is conceived through, something other than itself”) of that one substance. For the Skaal, all souls, and potentially all of existence whatsoever, has its source and its definition in the All-Maker, which is then fashioned through the process of existence itself, changing but never really going away.

Seeing as we’ve brought him up, it’s probably time to discuss the All-Maker directly.

The All-MakerFirst off, I’m not totally sure that the evolution I’ve just talked about is absolutely the case. There’s a leap from the ancient Nord pantheon to the All-Maker, which quite a few folk claim to be monotheism for the Elder Scrolls. Most particularly the combining of several disparate entities with control over limited purviews into a handful of entities with more wide-reaching authority (or maybe influence is a better word here? I’m not sure “authority” is quite what I’m after). The Story of Aevar Stone-Singer links the various aspects of the natural world to the All-Maker quite directly, with the words of the Adversary:

"You of the Skaal have grown fat and lazy. I have stolen the gifts of your All-Maker. I have stolen the Oceans, so you will forever know thirst. I have stolen the Lands and the Trees and the Sun, so your crops will wither and die. I have stolen the Beasts, so you will go hungry. And I have stolen the Winds, so you will live without the Spirit of the All-Maker.

There are also notes of the mainstream Nordic pantheon here, and of YHWH from the Torah, where the word for “spirit” in the sense of “spirit of God” is sometimes expressed as “breath” or “wind”, conflating spirit with both in the same way as the above passage. It also links to Nordic belief through linking to Kyne, the goddess of the wind and head of the Nordic pantheon.

These sorts of little hints get a whole bunch of speculation in various corners of the lore community about who the All-Maker is. However, there’s a bunch of pretty huge hints that come up in the unlicensed text the Seven Fights of the Aldudagga. Most particularly this:

He was the Aka-Tusk, a somewhat foreign spirit (yeah, right) from the Totem Wars, and known mainly in the tongue of Men as the enemy-brother of Shor, and he said, “Look on them, my friends, and how the North has gone insane with the beating and beating of the Doom Drum, whose father they fool-talk call their All-Maker.”

The “Doom Drum” is the key here, which is a soubriquet of Lorkhan. It’s also a fit because Lorkhan was the one who planned and built the mortal plane, and in a way made everything. However, there’s a bit of a way to go to get to the All-Maker, and for that we need to go back to The Monomyth. Particularly this passage:

In most cultures, Anuiel is honored for his part of the interplay that creates the world, but Sithis is held in highest esteem because he's the one that causes the reaction. Sithis is thus the Original Creator, an entity who intrinsically causes change without design. Even the hist acknowledge this being.

This would put Sithis or Padomay in the position as the All-Maker, which is about as definite as we can get. There is the statement that Siths “begat” Lorkhan from the book Sithis, while The Monomyth claims Padomay as Lorkhan’s father. This puts the Skaal in a similar position to the Argonians, although the act of creation and the individual shapes are seemingly more important to the Skaal than they are to the Argonians, who put more emphasis on the overall cycle.

Where the Skaal really differ is not in the reverence of Sithis as the All-Maker, but how their general idea of what the other spirits are. Other faiths, typically those that are more Aldmeri in inclination, indicate that the more general spirits became the Ehlnofey and the laws of nature in order to survive in the limited world of Mundus. They do not link those spirits to Lorkhan in any real way, whereas the Skaal claim they are part of the same substance as Lorkhan. It’s certainly an interesting take on the supernatural genealogy of the Aurbis. Even with the Argonians having a similar attitude to Sithis, the aspects of Sithis that we see in the events of The Elder Scrolls: Online don’t seem to have dominion over any aspects of nature in the same way as is implied with the All-Maker.

The All-Maker is also, as I mentioned earlier, often claimed to be monotheism on Tamriel. This isn’t quite the case, although I can see why they would think that, particularly given the Spinoza parallels we’ve already gone over, although most don’t tend to go that deep - they just rely on the worship of a single god. However, the Skaal do appear to have something that makes them closer to monolatry - the worship of one god, but acknowledging the existence of more than one. Or maybe dualism. They acknowledge one other being and force in their cosmology, generally dubbed The Adversary.

The AdversaryThe Adversary is the devil figure of the Skaal faith, and looks to take things away from the Skaal. You’ll also see several questions about who precisely the Adversary is in various places online, but I think it’s fairly cut-and-dried, although there is one exception, which we’ll get to later.

The Story of Aevar Stone-Singer points to the Adversary as formulations of the Aka-spirit. In particular, the text says this:

The Adversary has many aspects. He appears in the unholy beasts and the incurable plague. At the End of Seasons, we will know him as Thartaag the World-Devourer. But in these ages he came to be known as the Greedy Man.

The text also notes the Falmer as servants of the Adversary, and Falmer are very much into Auri-El worship. These are all little pointers towards Aka-variants being the Adversary in various ways. Particularly as the time god is one of the best examples of a deity with “many aspects”.

However, The Seven Fights does also contain some contrary evidence that seems to indicate that the Greedy Man could be Lorkhan. Maybe. The text in question has a lot going on, and I think I’d probably present it in all its messiness, from Fight One of The Seven Fights:

"Oh crap," the Greedy Man said, "He knows my bargain with the king of leapers, I'd better hide under my mountain!" but he thought and said all this too fast and, without thinking, hid under his mountain even though its base had already been eaten and so it wasn't all still there. (This is how the Greedy Man became trapped both in and outside of kalpas.)

The Greedy Man hiding under a mountain sounds awfully like Lorkhan’s Heart being put under Red Mountain, which would make the Greedy Man Lorkhan in this telling. However, being both in and out of kalpas also feels a little Lorkhanic - while he’s never described as such, having his Heart on Mundus and the rest of him possibly somewhere else (whether the moons are part of Mundus is something I discussed a while back) does feel like a possible way of looking at what happened to him. He’s also described as standing on top of Red Mountain. Although the Greedy Man’s mountain being described as not being all there put me in mind of Snow-Throat, although the top of that mountain is what’s half-there, not the base of the mountain. To cap it all off, both Red Mountain and “Throat Mountain” are name-checked in the Seven Fights, but neither are named in the passage we’ve just been through. So it’s a bit of an uncertain mess, but I get the feeling that the Seven Fights want us to think that the Greedy Man is Lorkhan, although that does contradict most other things we hear about him. The only real explanation I can think of is that these tales are possibly Nordic in origin, rather than Skaal; we don’t get an author, but they do put the Nords front-and-centre, while only referring tangentially to the Skaal. If that’s the case, they could be getting some details wrong about how the Skaal actually perceive their deities. I’m not totally sure about that, but it could be a reason why the Greedy Man is presented in this way.

You’ll note there that I’ve been conflating the Greedy Man and the Adversary, which the quote from Aevar Stone-Singer somewhat goes against by saying that the Adversary has many aspects. Part of this is how it’s described in Paradise Lost, but I’m also reminded of the serpent in the Garden of Eden narrative in Genesis 3, and the presentation of Satan more generally in the Bible. The serpent who tempts Eve isn’t identified with Satan in any way in that text, and Satan in the book of Job is more a spirit acting under God’s authority than what we in the English-speaking world think of when we say “devil”. There are other presentations in the books of the Prophets and the Law that put it at odds with what God and the Israelites are doing, but without much consistent characterisation. Where this comes into Paradise Lost is that it isn’t the serpent itself who tempts Eve with the fruit from the garden, but Satan dwelling in the mind of the serpent. I think a similar thing is happening with the Greedy Man - it isn’t the man himself that is the problem, but the force within him.

Whether this force is an actual thing I’m not sure, or whether “Adversary” is a designation like “Sharmat” for “enemy of the Dunmer” (as I’ve discussed before). There certainly seems to be an odd mix of entities in the Adversary set - we have the following, from Aevar’s tale:

• unholy beasts
• The incurable plague
• Thartaag the World-Devourer
• Greedy Man

These do make a couple of my Daedra senses tingle - the idea of “unholy beasts” makes me think of Hircine in his role as the “father of man-beasts”, while the “incurable plague” is definitely Peryite’s domain of plague and disease. Thartaag the World-Devourer is the big obvious one, as Alduin, and then we have the Greedy Man. I was quite curious about this, because it consistently casts the Adversary on the Anuic side of the Anu/Padomay divide, and then it groups an Aka-spirit with a couple of Daedra. They are possibly the only group in Tamriel to do this, I think - even the Khajiit, who are more liminal than most when it comes to their gods, broadly keep the Aedra-Daedra divide. So either the Skaal are somehow grouping things not-of-the-All-Maker together in a very arbitrary way, or there’s something else going on. I think the most likely thing for this is that the Adversary is literally that - a thing that opposes the Skaal, and as such can change from time to time.

Most of the Daedra will possibly make it onto that list at some point or another, in all honesty. We have this line from Wulf Wild-Blood in The Elder Scrolls V: Dragonborn, talking about werebears:

Twisted beasts, a curse of Hircine. True bears are noble and great creatures of the wild. But the Daedra have no skill for creation, so they befile [sic] the All-Maker's workings.

This backs up some of the things that we hear elsewhere, that the Daedra can only change and can’t create and so on, and so they will ultimately just twist the All-Maker’s workings. Elsewhere Wulf says that the Skaal way is intended to respect everything and not take more than is necessary, because everything is part of the All-Maker’s creation. So the warping of it by the Daedra will earn their ire quite naturally, I imagine. The only exception I could possibly see would be Peryite and Namira, as they represent natural processes to some degree, but Peryite’s already on the list, so I don’t think that those would make it out of being considered poorly by the Skaal.

Skaal CultureOne of the reasons that the Skaal seem to have remained so distinct from the rest of the Nords is that they have remained isolated so effectively. As such they’ve developed their own culture focused on their own ways and their own secrets. This is likely due to the philosophy of non-interference with the world, that they should only leave as small a mark on it as possible. This is an overflow of their religious outlook, which implies a philosophy of non-interference with the natural world as far as is possible, similar to some forms of Buddhism that emphasise consuming as little life as possible. In The Elder Scrolls V: Dragonborn, Wulf Wild-Blood says this:

We take only what we need, and so we preserve the oneness with the land.

and elaborates what that means with this:

We believe that all creatures have a right to live as they will, and when we take what we need from them, we thank the beast for its gifts. The less we disturb the land and the beasts within it, the more we respect the wishes of the All-Maker.

This worldview very much lends itself to isolationism. Storn Crag-Strider notes that the island of Solstheim was given to them by the All-Maker, and so they have little need to go anywhere other than what they have already been given. The Story of Aevar Stone-Singer has this to say as well, which I think implies something similar when the protagonist returns the Gift of the Beasts:

"You have returned the Gift of the Beasts. Once again, the Good Beasts will feed the Skaal when they are hungry, clothe them when they are cold, and protect them in times of need."

While this is very obviously an allegorical tale, it feels like this is illustrative of how the Skaal see things - the beasts aren’t being killed for their furs and meat, but are giving what they have as a gift to the Skaal.

That attitude of not taking more than they need could be behind the reason they’ve not expanded much beyond the single village they have on Solstheim. The time between The Elder Scrolls III: Bloodmoon and The Elder Scrolls V: Dragonborn does, in some ways, even show them somewhat in decline. The village had a rough militia in Bloodmoon, but there’s not much more than a few hunters in Dragonborn. You can get into questions of how far the games represent the lore on this, definitely, but there’s also a note in Children of the All-Maker that the Skaal are “dwindling” because:

The ashfall from Vvardenfell has taken its toll on the plants and animals upon which the Skaal depend for their survival, and life is now a struggle for all who call Solstheim home.

Which is kind of a shame, because they take some unique perspectives with them. One particular mystery is that of Stahlrim.

The Skaal and StahlrimThe Skaal consider Stahlrim to be a holy material, according to several pieces of dialogue in both games where we see. In Bloodmoon, Graring says this:

"The Skaal consider the Stalhrim to be holy. During the great war with the Dark Elves, many heroes fell in battle. Some could not be returned to Skyrim, and were buried here. Great magicks were worked on their tombs to protect their belongings from grave robbers, and their corpses from worse things. Energy was drawn from the land itself, and our heroes were encased in tombs of ice. That ice is Stalhrim."

This suggests that the Skaal had some part to play in the War of Succession, where the Nords took over, and then lost, portions of what would become Morrowind. It’s interesting that the Skaal are rapidly dropped from this dialogue after the first line or so, and not really taken into account after that point. That’s possibly because they weren’t Skaal at the time, maybe? I know it’s a little out there, but it’s possible that the original Skaal were simply the tomb guardians of the heroes who fell on Solstheim, and are the descendents of the original tomb-builders. We know from various bits of dialogue in The Elder Scrolls III and V that they have a tradition that knows how to work Stahlrim, and so they may come from those who created it. However, there’s no actual evidence of that - just my speculation about a possible origin for them, as we don’t really have one for them.

That origin, whatever it was, has been obfuscated through time. In the Third Era, Graring was made an outcast for trying to work Stalhrim, suggesting that a taboo has developed around it to a degree. However, I’m not so sure that was a taboo around the material, more its application. Graring and his fellows were cast out because they mined Stahlrim from unearthed tombs. That possibly puts them on the line for desecrating burials and the like, rather than just for working the material. I’m not sure that the Skaal would object so much to existing Stahlrim, separate from the tombs, was worked. However, if they ever had the knowledge of creating it, the Skaal we encounter don’t know how to do so. Most pointedly, as far as we know it’s not the secrets of forging Stahlrim that Hermaeus Mora wants from the Skaal, so that knowledge is either lost, or was never theirs to begin with. I like to think they knew, once, but that’s mostly because the creation of Stahlrim also feels like a nice origin point for the Skaal as a separate people, where we otherwise have very little idea of where they came from. But that could just be me wanting answers where there are none.

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The Tribunal as godsThe Orthodox AccountSo it’s probably simplest to start off with how the Tribunal became gods. If you believe the stories of the Tribunal Temple they became gods after the Battle at Red Mountain, although quite how isn’t explained. To quote the book Fellowship of the Temple:

“achieved divine substance through superhuman discipline and virtue and supernatural wisdom and insight.”

That’s about all we get. Like the official account of Talos becoming a god, which I covered some time ago in a cast on mantling, we get a lot more ink spilled on the process for the unofficial accounts than we do for the orthodox ones. The faithful think it just happens as a reward for effort. We do get a little bit more colour in the book Progress of Truth, but not much:

Temple doctrine claims [the Tribunal’s] apotheosis was miraculously achieved through questing, virtue, knowledge, testing, and battling with Evil; Temple doctrine claims their divine powers and immortality are ultimately conferred as a communal judgement [sic] by the Dunmer ancestors [including, among others, the Good Daedra, the prophet Veloth, and Saint Nerevar].

(for those of you wondering about Nerevar being an Ancestor noted here, the book Saint Nerevar claims that he blessed the Tribunal’s rule and divinity before he died from his wounds at the Battle of Red Mountain)

Stepping into the Anticipations’ shoesPlace as exalted ancestors, how that interacts with previous ancestor worship (supplanting of previous ancestor worship)

In doing this, the Tribunal take on the religious role of those that came before them - the Chimer were ancestor worshippers, and the Tribunal become the embodiment of those ancestors, protectors of the Dunmer where the fickle Daedra could not do it. And they were gifted the divinity to do it because they were such nice people.

But of course there’s more to it than that.

The Heretical AccountThe account preserved by the Ashlanders and various corners of the Temple hierarchy note that there is another possibility. This is the events that Vivec eventually owns up to during the events of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, summed up nicely in the introduction to Progress of Truth:

Dissident Priests ask whether Dagoth Ur's powers and the Tribunal powers might ultimately derive from the same source -- Red Mountain. Sources in the Apographa suggest that the Tribunal relied on profanely enchanted tools to achieve godhead, and that those unholy devices were the ones originally created by the ungodly Dwemer sorceror Kagrenac to create the False Construct Numidium.

This is the ultimate truth of it, that the Tribunal used Kagrenac’s Tools to tap into the power within Lorkhan’s Heart, hidden inside Red Mountain. Exactly when this happens isn’t clear. Both Vivec’s own account of the Battle of Red Mountain and the Ashlander legend recounted in Nerevar at Red Mountain note some level of study was required before the Tribunal could fully use the Tools. By this account, the Tribunal are not gods in their own right, but basically recycling Lorkhan’s divinity for their own ends. It was for that reason that they couldn’t do much about Dagoth UR on their own, without destroying it. This is speculated by the authors of Progress of Truth, but pretty much confirmed in Vivec’s account, which says this:

As the darkness grew, we fought it, and crafted walls to confine it, but we never could destroy it, for the source of the darkness was the same source as the source of our own divine inspiration.

This is worth putting a pin in for later - the Ghostgate was made to confine the blight and Dagoth Ur, but was ultimately going to forestall things at best, because the Tribunal needed the same thing that was powering Dagoth Ur as the source of their own divinity.

Or, at least, that’s the theory. There have been a few other possible sources for the Tribunal’s power, and I’ll go through those now.

Vivec and CHIMThe one you’ll see most talk about is Vivec’s CHIM. I’ve spoken about CHIM some time ago, so I won’t go into too many details here that aren’t directly relevant to Vivec’s godhood as such. Suffice it to say that CHIM has variously been claimed to be world-shaking superpowers, or a form of enlightenment, knowledge about the ultimate nature of the Aurbis, or realising that you’re in a video game. I’m sure I’ve missed some of the possible interpretations there.

We learn mostly about CHIM in the 36 Lessons, where Vivec apparently either learns it, or at least learns of it, from Molag Bal in Sermon Twelve where Bal says the word. It’s mostly assumed that this is where Vivec attains CHIM, as Vivec gains knowledge by hir submission to Bal in the sequence of events that is the Pomegranate Banquet in Sermons Twelve to Fourteen, and Sermon Thirteen is basically a CHIM instruction manual in various ways. If not then, then it's earlier on in the Lessons, Sermon Four, where Vivec drinks an “old bone of the earth” and in so doing “[becomes] a ruling king of the world”. I personally think that earlier reference is an acknowledgement that Vivec gets hir divinity from the Heart of Lorkhan, as the Heart gets referred to as the “heart bone” in various places, so with that I’m inclined to think that Vivec is at least acknowledging one part of hir divinity over and above CHIM.

I will also note that from what we know of CHIM, mostly from Mankar Camoran’s description in the Commentaries on the Mysterium Xarxes, that if CHIM can “reshape the land”, Vivec doesn’t seem to have used it all that much; there’s not been much in the way of land reshaping that went on in Vivec’s history; it’s possible that CHIM is what allowed hir to keep Lie Rock paused but ready to hurtle into Vivec City, but we don’t know for sure. Vivec at least ties that a little directly to the idea of the love of the people for the Tribunal, which we’ll get to in a bit.

I’d also like to introduce a possibility that Vivec may not have CHIM at all. We’ve said there’s not much evidence that ze used the powers CHIM granted, and I have to credit /u/HappyB3 with flagging the possibility that Vivec didn’t have CHIM at all. There’s this line from Sermon 37:

And the red moment became a great howling unchecked, for the Provisional House was in ruin. And Vivec became as glass, a lamp, for the dragon's mane had broke, and the red moon bade him come.

"The sign of royalty is not this," a signal blueshift (female) told him, "There is no right lesson learned alone."

I’ve seen this be an explanation for why Vivec didn’t achieve Amaranth, particularly as the Amaranth is achieved through the marriage of Vivec and Jubal in C0DA. The “right lesson” in this interpretation is Amaranth, but the signal blueshift also mentions the “sign of royalty”, which isn’t a term for Amaranth. However, the sign of royalty is CHIM. I’m aware this goes against a lot of the orthodoxy for understandings of Vivec, but I think that Vivec not having CHIM is a reasonable interpretation of that line. While the 37th sermon does deal with alternative timelines, that doesn’t begin until after the passage we’ve quoted. So if the signal blueshift is right, then Vivec doesn’t have CHIM, which is one possible explanation for why ze didn’t use it to get rid of Dagoth Ur. However, ze did retain some powers even after the Heart was freed. It can be argued that this was due to the game limitations of The Elder Scrolls: III, but there is another possibility.

The Faith of the PeopleThat is that the faith of the people, which may have played some supernatural role in sustaining the Tribunal’s powers. Vivec has has this piece of dialogue in The Elder Scrolls III:

"Why did I suppress the Apographa? Because it was such an unfortunate mixture of truth, falsehood, and speculation that I couldn't afford to manage the confused reaction of our faithful. Any doubt whatsoever weakened their faith, and we needed their faith to give us the power to maintain the Ghostfence. In retrospect, perhaps we lost the faith of those we most needed while preserving the faith of the meek and indifferent. Perhaps a mistake was made. Who can say?"

and after the freeing of the Heart of Lorkhan, ze says this:

We have lost our divine powers, but not altogether. Some token of the people's faith remains, and we shall dedicate it to rebuilding the Temple.

These both indicate that the belief of the people contributes towards the Tribunal’s power. This sort of thing is also hinted at in a Daggerfall-era book, An Overview of Gods and Worship. That suggests this as a theory for how the gods and worship interact:

It has been theorized that gods do in fact gain strength from such things as worship through praise, sacrifice and deed. It may even be theorized that the number of worshippers a given Deity has may reflect on His overall position among the other Gods. This my own conjecture, garnered from the apparent ability of the larger temples to attain blessings and assistance from their God with greater ease than smaller religious institutions.

Vivec’s words do seem to follow this paradigm, but we don’t have much indication that this sort of thing actually influences the gods in Aetherius.

Exactly how that worked I’m not totally sure, because “belief” is never really quantified in The Elder Scrolls. In the case of the Aedra it could be close to the real-world notion of religious belief, in that it can be “confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see” because the Aedra aren’t as active on Mundus as they could be. The Daedra are a bit too in-your-face for it to be entirely right, and their lack of connection to Mundus means that they are less likely to be directly affected by goings on in Mundus.

I also think that the effect of prayer and worship could be close to something like an Alteration spell, in a way. I’ll explain after a quick quote from Reality and Other Falsehoods, to set the stage:

Our reality is a perception of greater forces impressed upon us for their amusement. Some say that these forces are the gods, others that they are something beyond the gods. For the wizard, it doesn't really matter. What matters is the appeal couched in a manner that cannot be denied. It must be insistent without being insulting.

To cast Alteration spells is to convince a greater power that it will be easier to change reality as requested than to leave it alone.

If alteration spells are convincing those “greater forces” that the world should be a particular way, potentially prayers are a similar thing. The forces of the universe, which the book vaguely implies could be the earthbones, just hear that the Tribunal is great for so long from so many people, that they just make it so. This is possibly how the Prolix Tower works, now I think about it. I’ll have to address that in a future cast, though.

The Path to WorshipConvincing the greater forces is one thing, but I also wanted to make a quick note of how the Tribunal managed to convince the Dunmer to worship them in the more mundane sense. I’ve covered this in a previous episode, but want to go over the specifics of what the Tribunal did a bit more here, so I’ll skim some aspects and dig into others a bit more.

We know that the Chimer’s pre-Tribunal worship consisted of “fundamentalist ancestor worship”, according to Progress of Truth. This essentially meant worship and reverence directed towards those of their clan who achieved great things. They also worshipped the “good Daedra”, which were the main objects of worship by the House mer at the time the Tribunal came to power. These were treated as the ancestors of the Chimer, in some places at least; The Anticipations directly calls Boethiah an ancestor, and the Redguard Forum Madness re-translates “Daedra” as “our stronger, better ancestors”. So the notion of “ancestor” is somewhat fluid, being someone who takes ideologically after a person, rather than a literal blood relation. We see this with Malacath and the orcs, where his “followers” become very much linked to him when he undergoes his transformation. Instead of revering those that you’re descended from, the Chimer seemed to engage in a form of exemplar worship.

That made it very easy for the Tribunal to step into the role of divine overseers, where “might makes right”, essentially. The Anticipations say that:

“By the Apotheosis, the Tribunal (Blessed Be Their Holy Names) became the Protectors and High Ancestor Spirits of the Dunmer, and bade the Daedra to give proper veneration and obedience.

It is their role as protectors that was the foundation of the Tribunal’s position, which the Daedra apparently forfeited because they lacked the interest to protect the Chimer/Dunmer people. The text begins with this as a core principle, with one of the lines being:

In old times, the Chimer worshiped the Daedra as gods. But they did not deserve this veneration, for the Daedra harm their worshippers as often as help them.

There is a very fine line to be drawn here, which gives the Tribunal two claims to be the god-kings of Morrowind. Note that The Anticipations doesn’t actually say how the Tribunal achieved godhood, but kind of brushes over it with the term “apotheosis”, which is just the process of mortals becoming gods in general; it’s a term used to describe what happened to deified Roman emperors in this world, for example. Progress of Truth gives a relatively narrow account of what godhood is, and why the Tribunal don’t qualify:

Temple doctrine claims their apotheosis was miraculously achieved through questing, virtue, knowledge, testing, and battling with Evil; Temple doctrine claims their divine powers and immortality are ultimately conferred as a communal judgement by the Dunmer ancestors [including, among others, the Good Daedra, the prophet Veloth, and Saint Nerevar]. Dissident Priests ask whether Dagoth Ur's powers and the Tribunal powers might ultimately derive from the same source -- Red Mountain. Sources in the Apographa suggest that the Tribunal relied on profanely enchanted tools to achieve godhead, and that those unholy devices were the ones originally created by the ungodly Dwemer sorceror Kagrenac to create the False Construct Numidium.

and then goes on to say this:

While challenging the divinity of the Tribunal, the Dissidents do not challenge the sainthood or heroism of the Tribunal. In fact, the Dissident Priests advocate restoring many of the elements of Fundamentalist Ancestor Worship as practiced by the Ashlanders and by Saint Veloth.

So there’s a mixture of things here - that there’s an idea of godhood that involves a change in substance in some way, while sainthood is more to do with deeds, and an anticipation (heh) that the Tribunal would actually be saints. It seems that, by the time of the Dissident Priests, the notion of godhood within the Tribunal Temple has shifted - it’s not just the doing of good deeds that guarantees veneration (what the Tribunal were originally claiming), but that over time godhood becomes a difference in substance. This shifts from ideological alignment to a physical change. I’m not really sure what’s driving this, but it may be a form of “niche protection”. The Temple has many saints that it reveres, but they are not gods. Nerevar was the first of these, if the stories are to be believed, and as these saints expanded as the Tribunal wanted to emphasise the forms of conduct they wanted others to follow, the gap between saints and gods needed to become bigger.I think it’s that need that put the emphasis on the Tribunal as being a different kind of being as compared to other figures within the Temple pantheon.

That isn’t to say that they stopped being protectors, however, and nowhere is that as obvious as with the Great Ghostfence.

The Great GhostfenceThe Great Ghostfence was erected as a means to contain Dagoth Ur and the Blight. It is a development of an older practices, which the book Ancestors and the Dunmer put like this:

It is a family's most solemn duty to make sure their ancestor's remains are interred properly in a City of the Dead such as Necrom. Here the spirits draw comfort from one another against the chill of the mortal world. However, as a sign of great honor and sacrifice, an ancestor may grant that part of his remains be retained to serve as part of a ghost fence protecting the clan's shrine and family precincts. Such an arrangement is often part of the family member's will, that a knucklebone shall be saved out of his remains and incorporated with solemn magic and ceremony into a clan ghost fence. In more exceptional cases, an entire skeleton or even a preserved corpse may be bound into a ghost fence.

While the book in general is describing Dunmeri practices around the time of the Armistice, a more modern book goes on to say this:

The Ghostfence has forced many changes in the practice of ancestor worship. With the vast majority of ancestors' remains going to strengthen the Great Ghostfence around the mountain of Dagoth Ur, there are very few clan ghost fences in Morrowind. The Temple discourages such practices among the Houses as selfish.

This shift happens because of the need to defend against Dagoth Ur. Dagoth Ur presented both a theological and military threat to Morrowind, which only emerged after the advent of the Tribunal. Dagoth Ur was both a convenient devil figure upon which the Tribunal could cast all of the woes of the people, and an existential menace that needed containment.

Exactly when it was built isn’t entirely clear, at least to me. A Short History of Morrowind implies it was there in 3E 414. Ancestors and the Dunmer mentions it, and the book was written shortly after the Armistice was signed, in the late Second Era. However, we also have some Ashlander dialogue that says it was constructed ten years before the events of The Elder Scrolls III, which would be 3E 417. The preponderance of evidence says it’s much older, but the inconsistency still nags at me. If you want a more in-depth look at Ghostfence dating, check out /u/brunoTheOne’s thorough treatment of it.

Possibly because Dagoth Ur and the Tribunal drew from the same source, the Tribunal could not entirely contain the Blight that grew within Red Mountain, and so another source of power for the Great Ghostfence was necessary. Both the Plan to Defeat Dagoth Ur and Vivec’s dialogue suggest that this was the faith of the people. In order these are:

However, we failed because we were required to stage an assault and simultaneously maintain the Ghostfence to prevent the threatened large-scale breakout of Dagoth Ur's blighted hosts. With the Nerevarine leading the assault, and the Tribunal free to devote their full energies to maintaining the Ghostfence, this plan has a greater chance of success.

and

"Why did I suppress the Apographa? Because it was such an unfortunate mixture of truth, falsehood, and speculation that I couldn't afford to manage the confused reaction of our faithful. Any doubt whatsoever weakened their faith, and we needed their faith to give us the power to maintain the Ghostfence. In retrospect, perhaps we lost the faith of those we most needed while preserving the faith of the meek and indifferent. Perhaps a mistake was made. Who can say?"

While these sources are both likely to be quite pro-Temple, and therefore will give the people more an important role in order to keep them involved in giving devotion to the Tribunal, this does imply that faith is doing interesting things in interacting with the Tribunal, in more direct ways than we see in any other deified figure in The Elder Scrolls. This is closer to the American Gods/Discworld idea that worship gives gods power.

Which is just as well that the faith of the people wasn’t needed much after the advent of the Nerevarine. With Dagoth Ur gone, both the Tribunal and the Great Ghostfence go into the history books. While the fence itself carries on in the game once you’ve finished it, I’m not sure what happens in the lore in that regard. I don’t imagine they took the time to dismantle it, what with everything else that was going on with the Red Year, but we don’t hear either way. Possibly the fence stands as the relic of a bygone era, and a threat overcome. That feels like it would fit with Dunmer culture.

That's all I have to say on the Tribunal and the Ghostfence. Next time, we'll be discussing the Skaal. Until then, this podcast remains a letter written in uncertainty.

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Veloth in brief

Veloth was a Chimer, possibly the first. He was a highborn mer who was a prophet of Beothiah, who grew discontent with the pampered life on Summserset, and convinced several elves to leave with him. Whether he sought Boethiah out or was contacted by her himself is unclear, but he led an exodus to Morrowind, where the Chimer set up a new ascetic way of life, based on suffering and Daedra worship. He was renowned as a prophet, a healer, a discerner of Daedra, and was effectively the founder of Chimeri, and thence Dunmeri, culture. In a nutshell, I see him as a sort of Chimeri Moses, a comparison I’ll get to in a bit more detail soon.

As well as being the founder of Chimeri culture, the Dunmer ashlanders are seen as the ones who maintain his legacy in its truest form, at least by most House Dunmer throughout their history that we can see. Quite how true that is, we will get into. Tribunal era Dunmer culture dubs him the patron saint of outcasts and spiritual seekers, or in other words those who follow Veloth’s own journey, in a sense.

The book Veloth the Pilgrim describes its subject like this:

Rising to prominence in the Late-Middle Merethic Era on Summerset Isle, Veloth supposedly sought a more ascetic and pure way of life for his followers and gathered them into a grand pilgrimage from the southwest regions of Tamriel to the northeast. According to the contemporary texts, he "spared not a boat, ration, or strong-armed soul among his people in this exodus and toiled to reach the land of Resdayn."

I think that’s a good enough summary to start with. At least, so we can start picking elements of it to bits. I think we can start by the relationship between Veloth and Boethiah.

Veloth and Boethiah

Veloth the Pilgrim and several other texts paint the beginning of Veloth’s exodus as something that Veloth initiated. However, there is a possible alternative. The Fall of Trinimac puts it like this:

During the Merethic Era, a cult of Aldmeri dissidents abandoned the commonly accepted worship of Summerset Isle and began following a young prophet, Veloth. Boethiah had been speaking to Veloth in dreams and visions, guiding him to lead a new sect of Aldmeri with the belief that mortals could ascend to become gods.

This text has Veloth in a much more passive role, being led by Boethiah to found the Chimer, on the basis of what would become the Psijic Endeavour. The general tone of the text is one of condescension towards the Chimer, and I think is pro-Orsimer in its outlook, thanks to a reference to Mauloch. So It’s likely that they are looking to male the Chimer look bad, and making Veloth look like a pawn of Boethiah would certainly achieve that. But it’s certainly another possibility. The book Changed Ones puts most of the results of the Velothi exodus as a thing Boethiah planned, although admittedly with help from others:

Boethiah told the mass before him the Tri-Angled Truth. He showed them, with Mephala, the rules of Psijic Endeavor. He taught them how to build Houses, and what items they needed to bury in the Corners. He demonstrated the right way to wear their skin. He performed the way to walk to achieve an Exodus.

This is interesting, as it says nothing about Veloth. Part of this is down to the time it was written, I think - the text is taken from Skeleton Man’s Interview with the Denizens of Tamriel, where the only mention of Veloth is as a place. I don’t know for sure, but I think Veloth as a character may have evolved after this text was written, later in The Elder Scrolls III Morrowind’s development. But even this text acknowledges that Boethiah didn’t do it completely alone; Mephala is given some credit for the Psijic Endeavour, which we’ll get to later. But there is at least the possibility that Boethiah was responsible for a good amount of what Veloth had planned.

Chimeri and Dunmeri culture lionises his role in establishing Daedric worship on Summerset, with The Judgment of Saint Veloth stating this:

Saint Veloth personifies daring, and those who follow the lessons of his life and teachings learn boldness and cultivate an adventurous outlook. He defined the difference between good and evil Daedra, and even negotiated the original arrangements with the good Daedric Princes. This ability to distinguish the good from the bad was a hallmark of the living saint, as was his penchant for healing and healing items.

This puts the relationship between Veloth and Boethiah a bit more on equal terms, with Veloth being the one to negotiate the terms of the arrangement. It’s possible that Veloth selected Boethiah for a greater goal of forging the Chimer into something else, something different from the place they were planning to leave.

In-universe, I think part of the way to explain the possible conflict with regard to Veloth and Boethiah might be due to a shift in the culture of the Velothi elves and their descendents. Changed Ones was originally dialogue from Dres Molaghi, and the Dres are more inclined towards Daedra worship than the other Great Houses, even in the Tribunal era. It’s possible that Veloth’s role was inflated by the Tribunal Temple, with the role of saints being a relatively new way to revere the ancestors, and downplay the importance of the Daedra. So it’s possible that Veloth may have been a tool used to diminish Boethiah, and he wasn’t actually that important.

However, there are some anomalies that point to Veloth having at least some autonomy from Boethiah’s influence. Both The Judgment of Saint Veloth and the names for several spells in The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind suggest that the Dunmer associate Veloth with healing, and there is nothing in Boethiah’s teachings that suggest healing is a practice Boethiah values. So I think it quite likely that Veloth was more than a simple Boethiah cultist, taking what elements of Boethiah’s teachings he had a use for, alongside aspects of other teachings, in order to reforge the Chimer into something else.

I see the involvement of the other Good Daedra here is a good reason to think that Veloth was more active in his relationship with Boethiah - I’m not sure why Boethiah would bring Azura and Mephala into the culture, if she had carte blanche to shape Chimeri culture according to her whims. So I’m inclined to assign Veloth a more active role in the partnership.

Even without necessarily being the sole guiding light for the Velothi exodus, Boethiah may well have provided much of its conceptual framework. The Tri-Angled Truth and the Psijic Endavour have been claimed as Boethiah’s, rather than Veloth’s, if you follow the claims of Changed Ones that we discussed earlier. But we’ll get to those later on.

Veloth’s Exodus

I’ve heard it said that one of the reasons that Boethiah and the other Good Daedra were chosen for the Velothi exodus was because they gave them the virtues that allowed them to survive as a dissident people in an oppressed place. The argument goes that Boethiah gave them the strength and will to persevere, Mephala gave them the skill to assassinate those who would rival them, and Azura showed them how to be different from the Altmer. Or something like that; a bunch of Azura’s contributions are attributed to Boethiah, if you believe Varieties of Faith, so the line between the two is blurry.

I’m not totally sure I support that reasoning, because it implies some degree of covertness to the Velothi leaving the isles. We don’t actually know how they left in any great detail; at the very least, the final stages of their leaving were public, when Boethiah ate Trinimac. There are also some accounts that seem to suggest that this was a very public flight; Veloth the Pilgrim claims that:

According to the contemporary texts, he "spared not a boat, ration, or strong-armed soul among his people in this exodus and toiled to reach the land of Resdayn."

Given that, I think it likely that the Velothi probably left very publicly. I suppose they could have planned everything covertly and prepared the way, that sort of thing, but not necessarily too much; the Chimeri exodus was part of a broader splintering of Altmeri society, so there was probably a lot of general unrest going on. I’ve mentioned it before in this podcast when discussing the Direnni, but will restate it here for reference. We have this from the Third Edition Pocket Guide to the Empire’s description of Summerset history:

The religion of the people also changed because of this change in society: no longer did the Aldmer worship their own ancestors, but the ancestors of their "betters." Auriel, Trinimac, Syrabane, and Phynaster are among the many ancestor spirits who became Gods. A group of elders rebelled against this trend, calling themselves the Psijics, the keepers of the Old Ways of Aldmeris. With their mystical powers, they were able to settle in Arteaum, away from what they considered the corruption of their society. They continued to return to the land to act as advisors, but never again would they call Summerset home.

It was about this time that many Aldmer left Summerset to settle the mainland of Tamriel. There was probably no single reason for this second exodus of the Aldmer, but some evidence, such as the famed Ramoran Tapestries - the very ones that show some of the creatures mentioned above - show how untouched and beautiful the mainland was considered to be by the Aldmer. Expeditions, such as those taken by Topal the Pilot and others, had painted an image in their minds of a great land where even workers, at the lowest end of the Summerset hierarchy could live as kings. The Prophet Veloth was among those who led a group of discontented Aldmer away from Summerset to a new promised land.

This shows that there’s several cultural changes going on in Aldmeri (or Altmeri) society at the time of the Velothi exodus, and Veloth was part of that cultura ferment, although it would possibly be a mistake to construe them as being the same movement. Vehk’s Teaching states that Veloth isn’t part of the Psijic exiles, in spite of having the same name for the Endeavour and the Order. However, it is curious that only Veloth’s leaving was stopped by Trinimac.

There are two possible reasons for this, to my mind. It could be that the Velothi exodus was the first journey of settlers to Tamriel, and as such Trinimac was stopping the first form of dissent against Summerset’s hierarchy arising. It is also possible that, as an explicitly Daedric cult at the point of its leaving, the Velothi represented the greatest challenge to Summerset’s prevailing ideology, while the others weren’t so much of a schism as an expansion; certainly the Ayleids had some initial contact with Summerset after they left, as Before the Ages of Man describes the Ayleids as a “tribute-land” of Alinor, at least in theory. The Chimer were quite a sharp break from everything that Summerset represented, and so were a different kind of exodus. Indeed, in his book of the Chimer, Phrastus of Elenhir points out that “the Sapiarchs of Alinor … prohibited this schism”, indicating that the Alinor authorities had some form of say in the elves leaving their islands. Maybe the Ayleids were approved? But that’s something to dig into another time, I feel.

The Timeline of the Exodus

Before we dig into Veloth’s background and lead into what he wanted to achieve through the Exodus (although we’ve touched on that a bit already) I want to wrap up talking about the Exodus itself with a quick dive into when it happened, because there are a few conflicting accounts of it. We’ll go through those in roughly chronological order.

The book The True Nature of Orcs, which puts the Velothi exodus in the Dawn Era, without much more explanation. It’s the only source to do so, with others putting it somewhere in the Merethic Era. The Fall of Trinimac just puts it as the “Merethic Era”, while Before the Ages of Man and Veloth the Pilgrim both specify the Late Middle Merethic Era.

All of these options have their problems - if it happened during the Dawn Era, then there is a big gap between the exodus and Chimeri settlement on Resdayn. However, if it happened during the Merethic Era, what was Trinimac, an Aedra, doing strutting around like a normal personified deity? The consensus is that it happened in the Late Middle Merethic, but if that’s the case, I’ve not yet seen much in the way of satisfactory answers to why Trinimac was still around as an entity able to do things, rather than simply being comatose, dead or whatever your preferred metaphor is for the current state of the Aedra.

Veloth’s Goals

Veloth’s primary aim with the exodus, as we’ve already presented briefly, is potentially one of escape. While that will get to be a bit more interesting of a metaphor later on, I’ll start with talking about a more immediate escape, that of fleeing Summerset society. Despite being highborn himself, Veloth seems to have considered that society to be one that was too decadent, a word that comes up in several texts that highlight Veloth’s views on Summserset society. Veloth the Pilgrim notes that:

Veloth supposedly sought a more ascetic and pure way of life for his followers and gathered them into a grand pilgrimage from the southwest regions of Tamriel to the northeast.

That last note seems to indicate that the ultimate destination was unknown, at least in the specifics of it. Several texts do point out that Boethiah was guiding Veloth through dreams and visions, but they disagree about how far Veloth had actually seen the land in those visions. Relics of Saint Veloth’s description of the Tear of Saint Veloth says it was shed “when he first laid eyes upon the land of Resdayn, the new homeland he had seen in his visions.” That implies that he recognised the land from his dreams, and so had seen it. However, End of the Journey has a different tale:

Veloth drove them onward, chasing a vision that had come to him in a dream. He claimed to see a great hawk in the sky. He vowed that the hawk would lead the Chimer to a new home.

This gives no indication that he knew what the land looked like, just the direction he needed to head to get to the new home. But enough diversion back to the path of the exodus; part of the reason that this is all so vague is because what actually mattered to Veloth was the society that he was founding as part of it. That society was supposed to be more egalitarian than the one that Veloth had left. Exodus from Summerset puts it in quite idealistic terms, that I’m not really sure it ever fully lived up to:

Veloth the Mystic called out to those whose souls were weary, whose lives were ground out with no hope of improvement in a society founded on ambition, greed, and decadence. To those who hoped for a society that preserved traditions, praised honesty, and rewarded the just, Veloth's voice was as a golden note among a cacophony.

Veloth the Pilgrim led his followers across the seas and away from the lands they had known with the promise of a new land and a better future.

This sounds uniformly positive, and caring, and about justice. It lives up the same sort of vibe as Veloth being a healer, to the point where Veloth gives up his life for his people, as related in End of the Journey:

Veloth hoisted his mighty hammer and proclaimed, "Never again shall I wield this tool or any other to slay a foe. I have given my heart to my people, but now I shall give them more. I shall dedicate my life and my soul to them."

There are a lot of parallels to the Mosaic exodus here (right down to the “promised land” bit in some texts), where the Israelites were being led to “a land flowing with milk and honey”. And like Moses and the Israelites, Veloth was also seeking to transform his people. As End of the Journey puts it:

Veloth spoke to his people. "We are home," he declared. "This is the anvil upon which we shall forge a new people. One journey ends here, but another journey begins."

In particular, the Mosaic Exodus was trying to make the Israelites into a people who trusted God - it was flinging them into extreme circumstances, where they had to rely on God for their provision of food, water and other means of survival. Veloth is almost an anti-Moses in this way - he is trying to get people to go back to a simpler, harder way of life, which implies the notion of self-reliance and inherent combativeness and struggle against the environment. It’s not for nothing that Mehrunes Dagon is compared to the hostile land of Morrowind in Varieties of Faith and The House of Troubles. There’s no similarity made between God or anything like the devil and the Sinai Desert for the Israelites. It’s just an attempt to have Israel and God being a people and deity together. I suppose you can argue that there’s struggle in there, Israel means “struggles with God” after all, but I think it’s less front-and-centre than it is for Veloth.

It’s possible that there’s some similarities in the journey between Moses and Veloth; both are arduous and more heavy-going than they needed to be. For the part of the Israelites, they were intended to enter the Promised Land almost immediately. It’s a journey that should have taken about 2 weeks. However, the Israelites didn’t think they could overcome those who already dwelt in Canaan, and so God sends them back into the desert until all of that generation are dead. For Veloth, Summerset and Morrowind are on opposite corners of Tamriel; if Veloth wanted to settle the continent, there are plenty of other places that they could have settled, that would have been far simpler. However, like Moses, the journey would have whittled out those who aren’t worthy along the way.

However, that is where the comparison with Moses ends, I think. While Moses and God were looking to forge the Israelites into a “kingdom of priests” and through them save the world, Veloth and the Chimer were more insular. This was a transformation that was to involve just the Chimer themselves, not so much changing the world through a select people, which is what God was attempting to do with the Israelites.

Veloth, Ancestors & the Daedra

The Velothi exodus was a religious pilgrimage and schism, though. Before the Ages of Man describes the Chimer as devoted to “fundamenetalist ancestor worship”, in contrast to the select ancestor worship practiced by Summerset. I should note that “ancestor” is a loose term here, that the Daedra were considered ancestors by the Velothi, despite being a different category of being. The Redguard Forum Madness from 1999 contains a post by MK that suggests that, contrary to what we know from Altmeri theology, Daedra means “our stronger, better ancestors”. While this translation is not entirely acknowledged in official materials, The Inexplicable Patron Loremaster’s Archive makes it explicit that the idea of ancestry is more ideological than anything else, with this little aside:

I find myself shamed (as I often am), but not surprised (as I never am) by the gross misunderstandings of the nature of the Daedra that “adopted” our ancestors

This makes it clear that the Dunmer, and by extension the Chimer, didn’t see the ancestry as literal, but instead one of the people being chosen by the Daedra for a particular purpose. Veloth would have been pivotal in achieving this, if the account from The Judgment of Saint Veloth is close to accurate. According to that account, Veloth explicitly chose the Daedra, while Lives of the Saints claims that Veloth:

taught the difference between the Good and Bad Daedra, and won the aid of the Good Daedra for his people while teaching how to carefully negotiate with the Bad Daedra.

This puts Veloth in a more active role yet again, having him almost petition the Good Daedra for the sake of his people, rather than gathering his people around the notion of Daedra worship as such. However, this is a Tribunal-era text, and so it’s possible there’s some revisionism going on as to Veloth’s role here. The discrimination between good and bad Daedra does highlight a role that Veloth has in mind for the Daedra, although even the Bad Daedra can be interacted with, if done with care. The difference between the Good and Bad Daedra, then, is not simply that some are to be embraced and some are to be avoided; it’s clear that they all have lessons to teach, according to Veloth.

I should point out here again that the issue of no written record of Veloth’s own teachings exist unadulterated. I’m curious to what extent the Good and Bad Daedra are a post-Veloth construct, though, because some sources point out that the distinction happens around the worship of the Tribunal. The book Darkest Darkness says this:

The Tribunal Temple of Morrowind has incorporated the veneration of Daedra as lesser spirits subservient to the immortal Almsivi, the Triune godhead of Almalexia, Sotha Sil, and Vivec. These subordinate Daedra are divided into the Good Daedra and the Bad Daedra. The Good Daedra have willingly submitted to the authority of Almsivi; the Bad Daedra are rebels who defy Almsivi -- treacherous kin who are more often adversaries than allies.

The book The Anticipations says much the same. Perhaps the most interesting note appears when asking Ashlanders in The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind about Daedric Sites. They come up with this dialogue:

When the Velothi first came to Morrowind, they worshipped our most terrible ancestors, the Daedra Lords. Legends say the Daedra Lords themselves built these great shrines, because mortals could not build anything grand enough to suit them. When the Tribunal claimed to have tamed the Daedra Lords, they forbid the worship of the Bad Daedra, Malacath, Mehrunes Dagon, Molag Bal, and Sheogorath.

Both of these sources seem to indicate that it was the Tribunal, not Veloth, that defined the difference between the good and bad Daedra. There are lots of sources that say that it was Veloth that did it, but the lack of contemporary sources has me wondering whether the distinction is a post-Veloth construct. I’m sure I also remember a source that claims that all seven Daedric Princes, both Good and Bad Daedra, helped the Chimer leave Summerset, but I can’t for the life of me remember what that text was, so I can’t be sure it actually exists and isn’t a figment of my imagination. If you can remember what that was, please let me know!

Veloth and the Psijic Endeavour

“Endeavour” is quite the word for it, in fact. Veloth is credited in places with the formation of the Psijic Endeavour, described in Vehk’s Teaching like this:

Veloth describes the Psijic Endeavor as a process of glorious apotheosis, where time itself is bent inward and outward into 'a shape that is always new'. Those who can attain this state, called chim, experience an ineffable sense of the godhead, and escape the strictures of the world-egg.

It should be noted that, while Veloth is given credit for establishing the anti-laws that govern the Endeavor, this process has its antecedents in the teachings of the Black Hands Mephala, Boethiah, Azura, Trinimac, and, of course, Lorkhan, through that lord's association with PSJJJJ.

This text credits Veloth to an extent with the creation of the Psijic Endeavour, which the Loveletter from the Fifth Era corroborates as an attempt to escape the restrictions of the world, and move beyond it to another. I think this text presents Veloth as an Alessia-esque figure. He, like the Slave-Queen, produced an “elegant synthesis” of other teachings that resulted in a new practice. However, it’s not totally clear whether Veloth really knew about things like the Amaranth, as a thing to move beyond the current means of existence.

However, I should point out that much of this is still attributed to Boethiah in Tribunal era teachings; Changed Ones both present elements of the Endeavour, the Tri-Angled Truth, as things that Boethiah spoke to Trinimac, rather than being present in Veloth’s teachings as such. Only Vehk’s Teachings puts Veloth in the centre for this sort of thing, giving the description of the Endeavour we quoted a few moments ago.

That it has its antecedents in the teachings of various Daedra, it’s entirely possible that that’s why those Daedra were chosen by Veloth, because their teachings would lead to the Endeavour. If so, it would also lend a little bit of credence to the idea that the Bad Daedra are a necessary part of the process - if Vivec attained CHIM, the Pomegranate Banquet in Sermons 12-14 of the 36 Lessons where Vivec does a variety of things to and with Molag Bal is definitely part of the process, as it’s the only time that CHIM is mentioned. If that’s the case, then that could well be why we don’t see many people trying to achieve the Endeavour, particularly among the House Dunmer; they’ve forgotten that the restrictions of the Bad Daedra are as much a part of Veloth’s process as dealing with the Good Daedra.

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PSA: Having recorded this, one of my fantastic patrons has flagged a few errors here and there with this. I will be doing further investigations into this. I'm not a language scholar by training, so please by all means flag any errors that have come up in this, and I'll get to them in another episode.

Constructed Languages, Fantasy & Elder Scrolls

Languages in fantasy often have a very core part to play in the creation of the worlds that they are a part of. It’s pretty common knowledge by this point that JRR Tolkien created Middle-earth specifically so that he could have a place for his constructed languages to evolve in. This means that Quenya, Sindarin, Khuzdul and the rest all had a singular vision of what they should be, and how they should work, even if that changed over time. This has, by and large, survived in how these languages are understood today. There are various attempts at neologisms here and there, but most of these languages that are used are the words and grammar that Tolkien envisioned, and can be understood by readers and speakers who learned as part of independent communities. The other claimant for “most famous” fictional language, Klingon, was similarly designed by a single linguist and has the Klingon Language Institute to be a single source of truth for the language’s form and evolution.

That’s not the case with The Elder Scrolls, which have had multiple developers contribute vocabulary and occasionally grammar for various languages at various times, with different influences at different points. This makes it a little difficult to arrive at concrete rules for how the languages evolved and how they relate, as different languages will often have been created in isolation from each other, making them seem a bit odd.

The best example of this is the treatment of Ehlnofex, supposedly the language of the Ehlnofey and therefore close to what the gods of Tamriel would have spoken on some level. Several examples of this language are in ALL CAPS, like CHIM, ALTADOON, PADHOME etc, while some others, like “beratu” and “Nirn” are not. Personally, I think that “beratu” is some derivative of Aldmeris rather than Ehlnofey, as it sounds far too similar to the Ayleidoon samples we have, so it may be that this is mistaken attribution by Phrastus in The Bretons: Mongrels or Paragons?, rather than an actual Ehlnofex word. This also tends to mean that the central point of the languages has tended to be to enhance the feel of the narrative and not really exist as independent entities. The languages have evolved in that way to a degree, but the languages themselves are never really “the point”, if you like.

Ehlnofex

This is definitely the case with Ehlnofex, the language of the Ehlnofey. I’m sure I saw something somewhere to say it was the language of the gods as well on some level, but I can’t actually find any sources for that, so I’m assuming that’s speculation I’ve read somewhere. Ehlnofex is a language that is much more intimately connected with magic than other languages, at least in how it’s presented in quite a few places. Granted that is mostly in the 36 Lessons of Vivec, but we do have Ehlnofex words directly called “spells” and “words of power” in that particular text.

If we take Vehk’s Teaching at its word, Ehlnofex feels like something similar to Thu’um, in that the words themselves contain actual power:

As with most characters of that dangerous language [Ehlnofex], the sigil CHIM constantly distorts itself. Those scholars that can perceive its shape regard it as a Crowned Tower that threatens to break apart at the slightest break in concentration. (emphasis added)

A lot of fans have noted that CHIM is inherently unstable, mostly because CHIM is seen as an unstable state, from everything we hear about it in the 36 Lessons and MK’s other writings. However, this quote says that most Ehlnofex is like that. This means that any Ehlnofex word is tapping into “power”, whatever that might mean.

Another thing: it’s also noted as a sigil here, rather than a word as such. That implies, to me at least, that Ehlnofex is a more pictorial language than Roman characters, and that words in Ehlnofex are constructed through the combination of different graphical elements, in a similar way to Chinese, Japanese, and Korean scripts. That’s purely my imagination, though.

Ehlnofex also forms the basis for several other languages, and you can find Ehlnofex elements here and there in other tongues as well. This is most common in Dunmeris, but there’s also some overlap in Aldmeris as well. Things like “Bal” meaning “stone” according to Gentleman Jim Stacey and being Ehlnofex if you take the 36 Lessons’ VERY SUBTLE DENOTATION OF EHLNOFEX as universal, because it appears in the list of the House of Troubles given in Sermon Thirteen. The most common overlaps are in merish languages, although given the most commonly accepted origins of the sapient races given in the Anuad, you’d expect Ehlnofex to have an influence on mannish tongues as well. It’s a little difficult to discern, as in the modern games everyone seems to speak Tamrielic, which the description of Altmer in The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind notes is based on the Altmer tongue, which means that we can’t get a true picture on what mannish tongues sound like from the state of the speech in the games.

Ehlnofex is potentially the oldest language on Tamriel, and as the root of the various merish tongues is one of the biggest ur-languages on Tamriel. The other is that of Dovahzul, the dragon tongue.

Dovahzul

I should also point out that “dovahzul” doesn’t actually appear anywhere in-universe, it’s just easier to say than “the dragon language” all the time, so I’ll be using that going forward.

With its written form based on real-world cuneiform, the world’s oldest surviving written language, Dovahzul seems to be an attempt at creating another ur-language, which was likely developed by the dragons themselves. As well as being based on cuneiform, Dovahzul also has the benefit of being easy to scrape with a claw.

I think this feels like it conflicts with some earlier lore, in Before the Ages of Man. In that, we have this:

The Nord culture hero Ysgramor, leader of a great colonizing fleet to Tamriel, is credited with developing a runic transcription of Nord speech based on Elvish principles, and so Ysgramor is considered the first human historian.

At the time Ysgramor left Atmora, dragon worship was still going on in Atmora, and so you’d expect Dovahzul to be part of Ysgramor’s frame of reference. Unless we infer from this passage that the dragon language was unknown to most of Tamriel’s population, which I think was accurate, given some other texts we have. The Dragon War says this:

Foremost among all animals was the dragon. In the ancient nordic tongue it was drah-gkon. Occasionally the term dov-rha is used, but the language or derivation of that is not known. Using either name was forbidden to all except the dragon priests. (emphasis added)

The term “dov-rha” is key here, I think. It sounds like a corruption of “dovah”, which could imply that the use of Dovahzul was disallowed among the non-priests in order to reinforce the caste system, and so Ysgramor could simply have developed his writing system because the pre-existing one wasn’t available to him. However, there is some conceptual confusion here, I think. Nine of the Word Walls you find in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyim contain the phrase “NONVUL BRON”, or “Noble Nord(s)”. To me that suggests that the Nords were intended to read these words and understand them. Maybe the inscriptions formed some more ceremonial purpose, where only the dragon priests spoke it, as part of ceremonial pronouncements? We don’t really have enough information, although the fact that some Draugr can shout indicates that there were potentially some Tongues among the secular population as well as the Dragon Priests.

It’s also possible that it wasn’t really a language that allowed a full range of expressions as such. The development of the Dragonrend shout indicates that Dovahzul may be somewhat conceptually limited. I think that’s tied to the purpose of Dovahzul, which is as an extension of the dragons’ sense of self and dominance, which is possibly one and the same thing. In a Loremaster’s Archive, Camilla Calsivius of the University of Gwylim says this:

As I’m sure you already know, Dragons are conquerors by nature. All my research indicates that this thirst for domination is not unlike our thirst for water in a desert. They need to bring the world to heel.

Given that as an important psychosocial imperative, I think this is telling that these words reflect the dragons’ view of reality. Remember that the words of the Dragonrend shout, Joor-Zah-Fruul, or Mortal-Finite-Temporary, were constructed by the Nords as part of their rebellion against Alduin, and weren’t part of the dragons’ own lexicon. That limits Dovahzul as spoken by a “native” to certain forms of expression.

There also seems to be a split between using the language as Shouts that affect the world, and as a means of communication. Several dragons use the words of Dovahzul without them having effects on the world, which contradicts what we read in Children of the Sky, which says this:

The most powerful Nords cannot speak without causing destruction. They must go gagged, and communicate through a sign language and through scribing runes.

If this is equated with the Voice and Dovahzul, which The Elder Scrolls V seems to treat as the same thing, then there must be different forms of the language. Children of the Sky also talks about the word being used as a “kiai”, which may be a misnaming as only Akaviri shouts are called that, but if it’s not, then it also implies that there are other things that go into giving a shout the ability to affect the world. This then means that their use in combat is a different mode of speech than simply using the language to converse. Given Arnegir’s statement that “[t]here is no difference in the dragon tongue between debating and fighting”, there is potentially a rhetorical “mode” of dovahzul that is engaged when persuasion is required. Exactly what that mode entails I don’t think we can tell, as the words of a shout seem to be picked at random from the word walls; there’s no common characteristic of the words that we learn that distinguishes them from the rest of the phrases on those walls.

Languages & Truth

That act of persuasion is similar to that expressed in Reality and Other Falsehoods, that the world can be bent to be another way. The direct quote is this:

To master Alteration, first accept that reality is a falsehood. There is no such thing. Our reality is a perception of greater forces impressed upon us for their amusement. Some say that these forces are the gods, others that they are something beyond the gods. For the wizard, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is the appeal couched in a manner that cannot be denied. It must be insistent without being insulting. To cast Alteration spells is to convince a greater power that it will be easier to change reality as requested than to leave it alone.

Where Dovahzul seems to be different from this that it’s not a request, it’s a shout, a demand. It’s a thing that insists that something is the case. This causes reality to change based purely on the force of the language. It also means that Dovazhul somehow taps into something primal that allows for comprehension and compliance with the shout. When the Tongues shout Joor-Zah-Fruul at Alduin just before they banish him, his response is “what have you done?” not “what did you say?” That means that he comprehended the words that were spoken to him. That’s like me saying “hagwhieojlg”, and you responding with something like “No, I’d prefer it to be Tuesday” without a thought. Something about Dovahzul possibly makes it inherently comprehendible by the universe. That may be why Shouting is considered Tonal Magic by some fans, because it can have those effects in the same way as Ehlnofex.

I also wonder if that very power means it’s difficult to spread it. That quote from Children of the Sky suggests that powerful languages are just not spoken as often as those that have less metaphysical weight behind them, which leaves the core of languages on Tamriel to other tongues. Chief among those is Aldmeris, and its derivatives.

Aldmeris

As well as possibly being a place, “Aldmeris” refers to the language of the Aldmer, which forms a linguistic core to several languages on Tamriel, including Tamrielic itself. The Altmer racial description in The Elder Scrolls III notes that “the common tongue of the Empire, Tamrielic, is based on Altmer speech and writing”, while Hasphat Antabolis notes that Aldmeris “is very close to modern Elven languages”. We get all this bundled together in a statement from Yakum Hairshashishi , who says this when you first meet him “Hello. Yakum. Speak Ashland. Old Elf, not so good speak.” The “Old Elf” he’s referring to is Aldmeris (“Aldmer” literally meaning “first folk”, or “elder folk”). Assuming that the player character is not walking up to random strangers and speaking in Aldmeris (which I think would be like walking up to someone and speaking either Shakespearian English in the UK or Vulgate Latin while in Italy), then we can assume a level of comprehension between Aldmeris and Tamrielic, even though the languages are somewhat different.

I think the comparison to Latin is the best way of thinking about Aldmeris, because we have some evidence that it was spoken as a functional language alongside other tongues, although whether it was a sort of lingua franca isn’t exactly clear. The Dwemer text Hanging Gardens of Western Coridale is written in both Aldmeris and the Dwemer language. As there was no record of full translations of the Dwemer language until the Last Dragonborn helped Calcelmo with his translation of the Dwemer and Falmer languages in 4E 201 (although partial translations can be made using the Hanging Gardens text), we can only assume that Aldmeris was used by the Dwemer to communicate with other races (mostly the Chimer), but we have no real evidence that this practice was widespread outside of Resdayn.

The existence of the Aldmeris language does hint at a shared cultural heritage for most elves, and it points to many similarities with names and places that are shared across elvish languages. However, it’s not clear where the language itself came from. If the idea of the elves descending from the Ehlnofey and thence the Aedra was the case, then we’d expect some relation to Ehlnofex, but I’m not sure we have enough evidence of similar words or grammar to make that assumption.

Possibly the closest successor to Aldmeris as a language is not actually the language that the Altmer currently speak, despite their claims of a more direct descent from the ways of Aldmeris. The Ayleid inscriptions we see in Cyrodiil have several words that are also noted as Aldmeris in several places, and we don’t have a similar amount from the Altmeri language. It’s of course possible that we only notice this because we’ve got more Ayleidoon than we do Altmeris (is that a word for the language? It is now, I’m using it), but without that caveat that’s what we wind up with.

Language & Nymics

Ayleids were also quite well-known for messing around with the substance of reality, something that the Altmer haven’t had a huge amount of interest in, it seems. However, they didn’t really seem to mess with language-magic too much, which I think is surprising. I also think that the language-magic we have in TES says something about the setting, so I’m going to divert a little bit here.

The Elder Scrolls has something like the “finding out the true name of the demon” trope, introduced in Battlespire with the idea of nymics. These are explained a little rapidly in this exchange:

Chimere Graegyn: I banished Dagon by invoking his protonymic. PC: Oh. Good work. His what? Chimere Graegyn: His protonymic. Like a mortal wizard’s true name. The focus of incantory magics. The short hairs. Chimere Graegyn: Oh, I’m sure it will do you no good. Since his reemergence from Oblivion, he has surely added a neonymic. To protect himself against me, and anyone else who gets his protonymic.

From this we can get that nymics are language representations of the self, although there’s no . Protonymics are potentially undeveloped in a sense, especially as Mankar Camoran states in the Commentaries at one point that he “was once like you, asleep, unwise, protonymic”. Protonymics are the names of a thing that are unchanged, and in their natural state.

Neonymics are things that are added to alter that true name state, which the fandom calls “nymic surgery”. In Battlespire, it’s just something simply added to a thing’s name (or, at least, simply for a Daedric Prince). There’s an idea in the fandom that Mankar Camoran did something similar with Mehrunes’ Razor to do various things, like wear the amulet of kings and “speak fire” as the Commentaries note. However, there’s not a whole heap of evidence to back this up as an actual thing that happened anywhere, so it may not be the real explanation here. I would imagine that there has been some manipulation of Camoran’s nymic though, as he talks about the phrase “protonymic” as his “before” state, rather than his “after”, where at the end of Mankar’s time in the desert he is “red-drink, razor-fed” and can “speak fire”.

There’s also a sense that language and existence may be linked in the use of some Ehlnofex, if we can backtrack a bit. The word “AE” is the word “is” in the sense of “exists” or potentially “is equivalent to”, according to some parts of the 36 Lessons. I’ve thought it in the past. It supposedly connotes existence, essentially (a little like Tolkien’s “to be” verb, Ëa, which was used to speak Arda into being). However, the Loveletter from the Fifth Era says the following things about AE:

First was Void, which became split by AE.

…

Death results in reappropriation of spirit towards its aligned AE—either to the god-planet Aedra or the Principalities of Oblivion.

…

You in the Fourth Era have already witnessed many of the attempts at reaching the final subgradient of all AE, that state that exists beyond mortal death.

…

Those who do not fail become the New Men: an individual beyond all AE, unerased and all-being.

That’s a bit of an infodump, but I think it’s helpful to have all the references together.

AE here is the thing that splits the Void, which implies that AE is a distinguishing characteristic of something. This is not “exists” in an absolute sense, although there is a portion of the Redguard portion of the Monomyth that may imply this. Instead, I read it as a divisor, “split by AE”, and the split between Aedra and Daedra. Think back to that last quote from the Loveletter, where “beyond all AE” is “all-being”; that is, beyond all division, where the individual is everything. Add to this several passages from the Truth in Sequence where names are themselves instruments of division, particularly this from Volume 2:

The Divine Metronome tells us that “Name” is the wedge that pries gear from pinion. The residue of Lorkhan’s Great Lie that loosens the wheel chain and corrodes the frame. The et’Ada Gears named each and each, in their way. Our lessers see this as a kindness, but the Mainspring Ever-Wound calls it a curse, rooted in selfish pride. To name is to cleave one from another

In that sense, then, AE is that which separates one thing from another, which makes A distinct from not-A. It is identity, in the technical sense of the word, which feels very similar to the work that nymics are doing. Neonymic is different from protonymic, or in other words “I’m not the same person I was before”, or something like that, as an English phrase. This makes nymics and the language used to express them a truth about a person, in the same way that the Thu’um is both an expression of a truth about reality, and the imposition of that truth itself.

I’m not sure whether this is true on the macro level, but it certainly feels that way in this world – languages are emblematic of cultures, and the ability to say or not say certain things affects a particular culture’s outlook, or the things they value. I think this is particularly clear with our most favourite of Dunmeri insults, n’wah, which is translated as variously “slave” and “foreigner”, which means that they equate the two. That reinforces the Dunmer perspective that they are a different type of being to all other cultures in tamriel, reinforcing their superiority. To use a somewhat distasteful real-world example, during the genocide in Rwanda in the early 1990s, the government referred to the Tutsi people as inyenzi, literally meaning “cockroach”. That the Dunmer have a similar linguistic turn towards non-Dunmer shows quite how far their superiority complex goes.

Tamrielic vs Cyrodilic

Speaking of superiority complexes, I want to spend some time discussing the overall language of Tamriel, before we get into some of the lesser-spoken languages. Tamrielic is, as I noted before, supposedly based on the language of the Altmer, while Cyrodilic seems to have different roots to a degree. The book On Wild Elves notes that Ayleids speak “Old Cyrodilic”, rather than Tamrielic, which implies that Cyrodilic has more Ayleidoon influence than Tamrielic as a whole. This would make some degree of sense on the face of it, because we have a potential real-world comparison in the American and British dialects. Both are English, but the accents are very different. This is because of the relative isolation of American culture over time – with exposure to many different cultures through a global empire, British accents changed to a greater degree from the origin point that the American colonies started from.

So we’d expect Tamrielic to essentially be the “British” of Tamriel, in this sense, absorbing all of the different influences of the different provinces while Cyrodilic had fewer influences and stayed fairly static. If that were the case, we’d expect the more mobile upper classes to catch other influences more readily than those who don’t travel as much. However, it feels like the opposite is the case, or something else is going on . Across multiple books and time periods (I note in particular The Wolf Queen, A Dance in Fire and the Tribes of Blackwood series), the aristocracy, military and merchant classes all speak Cyrodilic, rather than Tamrielic. If this was a gap between ESO and the other games I could understand it – the Interregnum begins with Cyrodilic as a common tongue that then falls out of use as the Second Empire’s influence crumbles. However, the books that are dated in the Third Era still consistently use Cyrodilic as a speech for these classes. Given that, it feels like the tongue that should change the most because of that should be Cyrodilic, rather than Tamrielic. The only real solution I can see is that there is a distinction between the Old Cyrodilic spoken by the Ayleids and the Cyrodilic spoken by the current ruling class of Cyrodiil. There’s also a letter to Thane Ogvar that suggests that at least some giants speak Cyrodilic in the Second Era. I’m honestly not sure what to make of that.

Exactly when Tamrielic arose isn’t clear from the texts we have, but it’s taken to be the common language in the games, the stand-in for whatever language you’re playing the games in. This is even the case for Elder Scrolls Online, so any elven influence on the language has to have been some distance from any game we’ve actually experienced. I wish we actually had a context for the Altmeri influence on Tamrielic, because then we might be able to know if it’s wrong and any reasons for that. Instead, we just have the Altmer Morrowind race description, stated as close to “word of god” as we get in The Elder Scrolls, which says that Tamrielic is based on Altmer language. However, at the point that was written in the real world, the role of the Ayleids in Cyrodilic culture hadn’t been fully developed – they’re not mentioned at all in the First Edition Pocket Guide’s section on Cyrodiil, and they’re only hinted at as a vague presence in the wilds at that point. So I’m almost tempted to hand-wave the description and say that when they said “High Elven traditions” they meant Heartland High Elves, or Ayleids. That would mean that Cyrodilic and Tamrielic are very closely related, but grown in different directions, with Old Cyrodilic being the root language for both Tamrielic and modern Cyrodilic, which the Ayleids preserved through their isolation from the rest of Tamriel.

Jel, Yoku & Cultural Isolation

There are examples of other languages on Tamriel that are affected by that same isolation in some ways, Yoku and Jel. However, the isolation has had profoundly different effects on their respective languages.

In the case of Yoku, the first edition Pocket Guide states this:

Yoku, the Redguard oral language, was almost entirely replaced as the need for foreign commerce and treaties increased.

Note here that it said almost entirely replaced, not 100%. You can hear some NPCs still using Yoku in The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard, which was set the same year the Pocket Guide was published, and there are some rough signs that Yoku is still around; in the Lord of Souls novel, a Penitus Oculatus agent has some rough knowledge of the language, suggesting it’s still around somewhere. I’d also be surprised if the Na-Totambu let their language wither out, as they are very concerned with the preservation of Yokudan ways. However, it’s clear that much has been lost, even with the efforts of the Crowns to preserve things; The book The Na-Totambu of Yokuda notes this:

Despite this fanatical veneration, much Yokudan knowledge was lost to time and feuds between the factions. The eldest Crown scholars scathingly chide the modern Redguards as mere cultural shadows of their ancestors.

I’d expect that the use of the language would be one of the things to go along with that; the Forebears would have likely dropped the language relatively rapidly; Yoku would have a totally different base from Tamrielic languages, and so not be understood through its similarities. However, for those communities that didn’t have to interact with the outside world, it would have stayed more intact. It would likely have homogenised – as Yokuda was a continent, there may have been many different languages (or at least dialects) spoken there, while we’re only really aware of one.

Yokudan and Redguard culture may also have a way of shaping the language itself based on cultural taboos that we don’t really see in other cultures on Tamriel. The Unveiled Azadiyeh says this in the Zahkin’s Many Heroes Loremaster’s Archive:

We speak no more of the Left-Handed Elves (may curses follow them into the Eight Abysses), for to recall their abominations but darkens our days—and who can say how many each of us shall have before Tu’whacca beckons us, save that they will be too few?

This is basically saying “we don’t talk about it, because it’s a bad thing”. This is a historian not wanting to talk about history, a sentiment that is echoed elsewhere in that Loremaster’s Archive. This kind of culture would readily not use words and languages that didn’t serve their culture’s purpose, whatever they see that as being.

Jel is likewise shaped by a philosophical outlook that has deeply affected its language. This quote from Murky Time expresses one of those differences best:

You see, as far as I can tell, Jel has no tenses; at least nothing that we’d recognize as a tense. The closest substitution I’ve heard interpreters use is “old” and “new.” They talk a great deal about “changing” and “becoming”- words that imply forward motion. But again, these words are obfuscated by all manner of arcane terms and concepts that even I can’t decipher.

For a language to have no tenses, it’s speaking in an ever-constant present, where past and future are of no real value. That seems to match Argonian values where the present is all that really matters, and all that really matters is a change.

Jel is also not related to any other language on Tamriel, as befits a race that emerged from entirely different origins. It uses body language for its full expression, including elements unique to Argonian physiology. That means that no one other than an Argonian can actually speak Jel – I don’t think it’s a matter of body language providing context and emphasis, but actual words as well, although these are often context to what’s actually being said, such as expressions of emotion. That’s why we get things like “I erect the spine of sympathy” or whatever when Argonians speak Tamrielic – they’re assuming that the expression of emotion that they’re conveying in words should be part of the physiological display of language, which it would be if they were speaking Jel.

Jel has not been snuffed out in the same way as Yoku because it’s not been disrupted in the same way – most Argonians don’t leave Black Marsh, and don’t interact with non-Argonians very much. As a result, Jel carries on being its own thing independently of the rest of Tamriel. I am slightly surprised that we don’t get references to different Jel dialects, as each Argonian tribe has its own traditions so I’d expect their own language variants to follow. Given that Elder Scrolls mentions dialects elsewhere, it’s a little bit of a weird omission.

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Today on Written in Uncertainty we’re investigating one of the most fundamental forces of the Aurbis, that is represented by powerful gods, and affects us here on Earth. Today we’re asking, what is Time in the Elder Scrolls? Note: I go off-script more than usual in this episode, so the audio has quite a bit more in places than this script. Stuff about Berkleyan idealism, and the nature of time in Oblivion in particular.

A Brief History of Time (with apologies to Stephen Hawking)

Time in The Elder Scrolls seems to function quite similarly to time in this world, with a few exceptions. Time in the Elder Scrolls is generally thought of to be represented, and created, by Akatosh. The ur-text fo this perspective is The Monomyth, which says this:

When Akatosh forms, Time begins, and it becomes easier for some spirits to realize themselves as beings with a past and a future.

This is then represented in various ways in the various creation myths of whatever culture is considered. It’s worth noting here that this isn’t when Mundus forms, that comes later (which we can now say, because time is a thing). What we’ve got here is time that happens in between the worlds, the time that is expressed in Satak the Worldskin, the Redguard Monomyth like this:

As the old world died, Satakal began, and when things realized this pattern so did they realize what their part in it was. They began to take names, like Ruptga or Tuwhacca, and they strode about looking for their kin. As Satakal ate itself over and over, the strongest spirits learned to bypass the cycle by moving at strange angles. They called this process the Walkabout, a way of striding between the worldskins. Ruptga was so big that he was able to place the stars in the sky so that weaker spirits might find their way easier. This practice became so easy for the spirits that it became a place, called the Far Shores, a time of waiting until the next skin.

This is one of the core texts for the concept of kalpas, that idea that Mundus is created and destroyed in cycles. I’ve done an episode on kalpas quite some time ago, so I won’t be rehashing that here. For now, note that there is a time outside of the mortal world. One opinion you’ll see in several places is that the Dawn Era was chaotic and unstructured, mostly from the text Where Were You When the Dragon Broke, which says this:

The tower split into eight pieces and Time broke. The non-linearity of the Dawn Era had returned.

That all seems nice and neat, yes? Before creation, chaos. After creation, order. That’s certainly how many real-world religious accounts go, but… it’s not the whole story for the Aurbis. We’ve just seen one example of the idea that there’s a time beyond the time of the Mundus, and then we’ve got this glorious little nugget from The Anuad:

The first ones were brothers: Anu and Padomay. They came into the Void, and Time began.

This puts Time happening before the creation of Mundus, before Akatosh, before any Et’ada really. So what on earth is going on?

Trans-Kalpic McTaggart?

I think one way of solving this, or at least moving towards that understanding, is going to the theories of time posed by John McTaggart (thaks to /u/The_White_Guar), that of A-time and B-time. McTaggart suggests that time is understood in two different ways of thinking about time. Simply put, A-time is how we experience time as beings (the past, the present, the future), while B-time is an objective time signature (say, 21st August 2021). I think that B-Time has to exist in some fashion for anything to happen (you can say “before/after event X” for pretty much any occurrence). So it might be simpler to say that B-Time is Time in the sense of measurable duration, which did not exist in any meaningful sense before the formation of Akatosh. A-Time began with Anu and Padomay, because you can have before and after events the instant you have entities, but having consistent stuff happening in a way that it can be realised and measured requires Akatosh, which can give you B-Time.

I think this is summed up quite beautifully in the text Murky Time, which gives an Argonian perspective on time and all this.

You see, as far as I can tell, Jel has no tenses; at least nothing that we’d recognize as a tense. The closest substitution I’ve heard interpreters use is “old” and “new.” They talk a great deal about “changing” and “becoming”- words that imply forward motion. But again, these words are obfuscated by all manner of arcane terms and concepts that even I can’t decipher.

This is echoing the same thought – there’s no tenses because there’s no A-Time, in McTaggart’s sense – the primary experiential time isn’t actually a thing that’s relevant. There’s just constant change, because the states being moved from and to and not of interest to the Argonians. The state is the important thing, not any sort of fixed end state. Indeed, I’d imagine that this wouldn’t actually exist in an Argonian perception of time. In the same text, a little before the passage I’ve just quoted, we have this explanation of an Argonian calendar, from an Argonian who doesn’t speak Cyrodilic very well:

[The calendar] is like a bowl of water. The day and the night swim in the bowl.

From that, it feels like general time (“day and night”) are things that are contained by that measurement of time. It’s the calendar that gives time shape. This is possibly different because of the Argonian perspective here, but I think there’s something that applies to time as a whole; that time and events are inherently unordered in Tamriel, and it is our perception of them that makes them ordered. The act of measuring them may affect the phenomenon itself.

Akatosh as a Reality God

So in a way, Akatosh is less the time god and more the perception god, or maybe causality god. It’s his job to see everything, and in seeing it, bringing things into the reality that is time. Backing this up is a quote from the text that got me on this particular thread of talking about the Elder Scrolls and time. From the book Pridehome: A Place Outside of Time?

Before time and the tapestry, Pridehome existed. As an ideal, it has always existed. It will always exist. The Dragon God of Time, Alkosh, wove it into the tapestry and time, making it real for the rest of us with our limited perception of linear time.

This veers a bit into Plato’s World of Ideas, with things existing as ideals rather than concrete things. However, if we’re taking Akatosh (or Alkosh in this case) as someone weaving something that already existed into Time, he’s just connecting things together. Hence thoughts about him being a causality god, but this text goes further than that.

This is saying that time, and perceptions of time, are required to make things real. This tallies with the beginnings of Satakal the Worldskin, which says this:

Satak was First Serpent, the Snake who came Before, and all the worlds to come rested in the glimmer of its scales. But it was so big there was nothing but, and thus it was coiled around and around itself, and the worlds to come slid across each other but none had room to breathe or even be "

(emphasis added)

This suggests that a bunch of stuff exists in potential form, or some way that doesn’t allow them to be fully expressed as existing entities, but that they require time in order to fully exist. Plus, if we get all dimensional for a second, if a thing only exists outside of the fourth dimension, how do we mortals, as four-dimensional beings, perceive it? If it’s not subject to time, would it ever interact with things that are? Could it realistically cause any form of change? I suppose it’s possible if you consider A-Time to be purely existential and not temporal. What do I mean by that? Stuff just happens, and you orient yourself around these things just happening; there is no cause as such, just spontaneous effect. If that’s the case, what’s to stop everything from happening at once?

This sounds incredibly like a dragon break, no?

Alternative Dimensions? Possible Worlds?

Although even in dragon breaks, there are events that happen and events that do not. The text about Pridehome seems to be implying something different:

Can you imagine, you who are bound to the tapestry and linear time, knowing that Ja’darri both succeeded and failed at the same time? Just as the one called Abnur Tharn succeeded and failed at the same time? And in the same moment, outside of linear time? Perhaps you cannot. Perhaps that asks too much. More champions heeded the call after Ja’darri, in linear time. More came. Clan Mothers came and went as well. Until, as time passed, in the common parlance, one named Ra’khajin arrived. He both succeeded and failed to become a champion, just as Ja’darri before him. How, you ask, is this possible? He succeeded until he left Pridehome in linear time, yes? But outside linear time? He succeeded and failed all at once. Or forever, if you prefer.

This is concurrent success and failure, both at once. This would suggest that there is a version of events where Ja’darri failed, and where Ja’darri succeeded. However, it doesn’t talk about the reality of those relative propositions. I think what might be going on here is possible world talk, and it is the time god that makes things real.

Possible worlds are a theoretical tool in analytic philosophy that was developed into some degree of reality by David Lewis. Lewis argued (from my fuzzy memory of it) that different worlds and different possibilities were the same thing; that the only difference between the actual world and other possible worlds is that we are in the actual world. This isn’t even a spatial relation for Lewis, but rather an indexical one; the “actual” world is simply the world which the thing referring to the “actual” world has as its frame of reference. If an entity has access to more than one frame of reference, multiple worlds are actual. Possible worlds are, in this account, no less real. Having access to multiple worlds is, I think, what is going on with Pridehome. And, potentially, the events of ESO Summerset with Crystal-Like-Law straddling multiple “dimensions”. I’m not 100% sure that those dimensions are not just different parts of the Aurbis, but if it is these different possible worlds, then it becomes even more cataclysmic for a malignant entity to get hold of it.

The Place of the Elder Scrolls

However, there is a rather scroll-shaped spanner in all this: the Elder Scrolls themselves. They become concrete records of what happened when the events they describe come to pass, like a form of the Observer Effect in quantum physics. If multiple events were happening at once in different realities, then wouldn’t the Elder Scrolls show different things?

There is the get-out clause that the Scrolls exist in a single version of Tamriel, and therefore would be subject to the constraints of a single reality as we’ve just discussed, but that doesn’t feel quite right to me. The Elder Scrolls are things that present multiple possibilities, and there are hints that there is a degree of hard determinism in the system, particularly if you believe Sotha Sil. This is the sense I get from the (unlicensed) Seven Fights of the Aldudagga, which says this about the pattern of events across kalpas:

And Dagon woke up with a hideous headache to look down on Sarthaal and look! It was not destroyed at all! There were its mighty sights, its halls, its fountain of voices, and the tusk-house of Jarl the Tongue! And arrayed before it was the Host of Hoary Ysgrim all lined up for war! “Oh crap!” Dagon said, shaking his hurt, hurt head, “I have come too early, for the destruction of Sarthaal has not occured, for I see the army of King Ysgrim waiting for the elves that I am sending. What could I be thinking, to come before the veils are pierced? Even the laws of trickery would not help me if I did that!”

This suggests that there are certain key events that are happening in each kalpa, that there is a degree of predestination, both in the destruction of Sarthaal and Dagon’s comments here about trying to destroy everything before Sarthaal being destroyed being a fruitless endeavour. However, the Elder Scrolls suggest maybe, possibility, and all that good stuff that is supposedly at the heart of the Aurbis for particular events. The Scrolls and Prisoners do seem exempt from that hard determinism. So maybe we have a compromise here – that some events play out the same over and over, but some people can cause divergence from the accepted path, and it is these possibilities that the Scrolls and the Pridehome text are picking up on? It’s possible that Ja’dari can both succeed and fail, but others can only do one thing.

If we take this to its logical conclusion (and I’m delving deep into speculation here, so please don’t take this as fact in any sense), maybe the Elder Scrolls are windows to these other possible worlds, which can only change at particular decision points? Are there a limited number of Possible Worlds for Tamriel because of this? I’m not sure, but that seems a likely explanation, if I’m right about the nature of the Elder Scrolls. Which I may not be. They’re often called Magnus’ blueprints, and given this sort of a model I’m almost seeing them as “world seed generators” in the sense of something like Dwarf Fortress’ worldgen (awesome game if you’ve never played it, check it out! It’s free). That these points that the Scrolls depict are points where the world can change, and then brings those possible worlds into full being through the temporal mechanism of Akatosh? That feels about right, but it’s not spelled out in those terms anywhere, so I may be getting things wrong somewhere.

Eternal Recurrence

Now we get to the first thought I had on reading the Pridehome text, which I’m now less convinced by: that of eternal recurrence, as expressed by Nietzsche. It’s not a terribly well-developed in Nietzsche’s work, with this passage in The Gay Science being possibly the best articulation of it:

What if a demon crept after you into your loneliest loneliness some day or night, and said to you: “This life, as you live it at present, and have lived it, you must live it once more, and also innumerable times; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and every sigh, and all the unspeakably small and great in your life must come to you again, and all in the same series and sequence – and similarly this spider and this moonlight among the trees, and similarly this moment, and I myself. The eternal sand-glass of existence will ever be turned once more, and you with it, you speck of dust!” – Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth, and curse the demon that so spoke? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment in which you would answer him : “You are a God, and never did I hear anything so divine!”

The Pridehome text does suggest something similar in that Ji’dari and Pridehome are constants, something that is “always” being replayed over and over. Although this is a little different, because it’s not always the same outcome. Eternal recurrence in the Nietzshian sense is more an encouragement to live your best life – do you want to live your life again, or would that be a terrible thought – rather than a reality in the sense that Ja’dari is supposedly reliving the moments of defeat and victory. If we were to follow Nietzsche, we would perhaps dwell on the despair and triumph of Ji’dari, and how this is a grand cosmic thing (which it is implied to be), rather than trying to put a series of events to tell of what Ji’dari did or did not do. There’s also the sense that Pridehome stands as an eternal bastion and not-bastion all at once, in a conflict that is never really resolved. That’s not quite Nietzschian recurrence. Perhaps the closest we get to that is the Seven Fights’ version of kalpas, where events replay over and over, with only occasional change? Even then, I think this is an expression of inspiration, rather than pure imitation.

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Today Written in Uncertainty is engaging in far more speculation than usual, although with no less uncertainty. We’re looking into the future, and trying to infer significance in things (probably) devoid of detail. Today we’re asking, what IS going to happen with The Elder Scrolls 6?

Blog post: https://writteninuncertainty.com/podcast/tes6

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Alessia in Brief

Alessia was the first empress of Cyrodiil. She’s also known as the Slave-Queen, because she rose up against the Ayleid rulers of the Heartland in 1E 242, who had enslaved the Nedes who were living in Cyrod at the time. Alessia’s rebellion succeeded within a year, thanks to her appeals to the gods and various other kinds of supernatural help, and she founded the first mannish empire.

She went on to create the pantheon of the Eight Divines, and thereby shape a lot of human culture for many centuries to come. She also founded the Imperial line in a decidedly non-human fashion. During the year-long rebellion against the Ayleids, she found time to fall in love with Morihaus the winged bull, Kyne’s son, and the next emperor of Cyrodiil after her was Belharza, the Man-Bull. Whether he’s the first minotaur is debatable, but Alessia is certainly responsible for the Imperial line. She potentially also goes on to influence generations of emperors through the Amulet of Kings, which we’ll discuss in a bit more detail towards the end of this cast.

Alessia’s Origins

I’ve touched on the origins of men before in this podcast, but I want to dig into Alessia’s origins specifically a bit more. She is a Nede, and is noted in The Adabal-a as the following:

Perrif’s original tribe is unknown, but she grew up in Sard, anon Sardarvar Leed, where the Ayleids herded in men from across all the Niben: kothri, nede, al-gemha, men-of-‘kreath (though these were later known to be imported from the North), keptu, men-of-ge (who were eventually destroyed when the Flower King Nilichi made great sacrifice to an insect god named [lost]), al-hared, men-of-ket, others; but this was Cyrod, the heart of the imperatum saliache, where men knew no freedom, even to keep family, or choice of name except in secret, and so to their alien masters all of these designations were irrelevant

This makes Alessia both Nedic and from the area of the Niben, essentially a precursor to the Nibenese Cyrodilic peoples. She also engaged in a fair bit of travelling. She grew up in Sard, on the southern banks of the Niben, and the next thing we hear is that she’s in Sancre Tor, which is in the foothills of the Colovian Highlands. It’s about half the length of Cyrodiil away from Sard. It’s not explicitly said, but I think the most reasonable assumption is that she ran away at some point. Given that The Legendary Sancre Tor notes that the Nordic conquests that would eventually reach Morrowind and High Rock began 2 years before Alessia’s rebellion, it’s possible that she headed north with the explicit goal of bringing the Nords into Cyrod to overthrow the Ayleids. I’d suggest even probable, but we don’t have any evidence for that.

Cyrod vs Cyrodiil

I’ve been using the term Cyrod to refer to the land, rather than Cyrodiil. Most of the documents of Alessia’s time refer to it as Cyrod, which is part of the reason I’m doing it, but there is also this great post by /u/TheInducer that points out that Cyrodiil probably means “people of Cyrod”. Exactly what Cyrod means, I’m not sure, but “heartland” is tentatively proposed. Either way, talking about the land, we talk about Cyrod. The people, it’s Cyrodiil or “the Cyrodiils”.

Alessia’s Name

That’s about all we really know about Alessia before her rebellion, and it’s that conflict that defines pretty much everything. We don’t actually even know her name. We have part of the Adabal-a, attributed to Morihaus, unpacking what her name actually means:

“In your tales you have many names for her: Al-Esh, given to her in awe, that when translated sounds like a redundancy, ‘the high high’, from which come the more familiar corruptions: Aleshut, Esha, Alessia. You knew her as Paravant, given to her when crowned, ‘first of its kind’, by which the gods meant a mortal worthy of the majesty that is killing-questing-healing, which is also Paraval, Pevesh, Perrethu, Perrif, and, in my case, for it is what I called her when we were lovers: Paravania.”

I think the second part may be a hint here at some of the thematic intent – the variety of P-names sound increasingly like Percival, which I’ve also heard as Parsifal in German, and Peredur in Welsh. Percival was an Arthurian knight, who was associated with the Holy Grail in the earliest Arthurian tales. I associate this with Alessia because of the name, and the mention of “killing-questing-healing”, which feels moderately like the idea of a questing knight. While we’re in the realm of knights, I was half-tempted to see if there are links to Spenser’s Britomart from The Fairie Queene, but I’m not sure she’s particularly relevant here.

Alessia as a Prisoner

The reason I’m being so wrapped up in knights and knight imagery is the idea of “killing-questing-healing”, which feels quite a bit like what knights do. For those of you that are sceptical on the “healing” bit, remember the Hospital of St John (now St John’s Ambulance Service) was a knightly order originally. As to what healing Alessia did, she synthesised a lot of things, most particularly Cyrodilic men, Ayleids and Nords, which we’ll get to that later.

While killing-questing-healing is what knights do, it’s also what player characters do in The Elder Scrolls. I’ve seen it mentioned, most particularly by /u/TheInducer in this comment, that Alessia could have been a Prisoner in the mystical sense in The Elder Scrolls. One who sees their bonds of imprisonment within reality, and then escapes them, changing things forever before fading into obscurity and the unknown. I’ve done a cast on the Prisoner before if you want to go back and check it out in detail, but the key point that TheInducer makes is that all Alessia’s names are titles. We don’t know her name, like every other protagonist in The Elder Scrolls. We do have a defined gender for her, which would break the pattern a little, and she doesn’t fade into obscurity in quite the same way as player characters, but there are certainly some interesting parallels there. She certainly brought about enough change to have broken existing patterns.

Alessia’s Pact(s?)

The biggest change, of course, was the shift in power in Cyrod from mer to men, thanks to Alessia’s pact with… someone? Exactly who or what Alessia made a pact with wasn’t really clear, from the text that we have. There seem to be multiple pacts going on here, doing different things. To start with what I think is probably the closest thing we have to authentic texts about Alessia, The second volume of the Song of Pelinal says this:

[And then] Perrif spoke to the Handmaiden again, eyes to the Heavens which had not known kindness since the beginning of elven rule, and she spoke as a mortal, whose kindle is beloved by the Gods for its strength-in-weakness, a humility that can burn with metaphor and yet break [easily and] always, always doomed to end in death (and this is why those who let their souls burn anyway are beloved of the Dragon and His Kin) and she said: “And this thing I have thought of, I have named it, and I call it freedom. Which I think is just another word for Shezarr Who Goes Missing… [You] made the first rain at his sundering [and that] is what I ask now for our alien masters… [that] we might sunder them fully and repay their cruelty [by] dispersing them to drown in the Topal. Morihaus, your son, mighty and snorting, gore-horned, winged, when next he flies down, let him bring us anger.” … [And then] Kyne granted Perrif another symbol, a diamond soaked red with the blood of elves, [whose] facets could [un-sector and form] into a man whose every angle could cut her jailers and a name: PELIN-EL [which is] “The Star-Made Knight” [and he] was arrayed in armor [from the future time].

The Handmaiden here is Mara, the Handmaiden of Kyne according to the Nords, and it’s Kyne who does the sending here, not Mara. Interestingly, Pelinal is described as a “another symbol”, and this is where I’d love to know the rest of the lost Song text, because we have the language of symbols and visions for Alessia in another text, which has a different spin on things. The Catechism of Saint Alessia says she prayed to Akatosh, who grants her visions:

Saint Alessia, through her purity and wisdom, earned the love of all good beings, mortal and immortal. At Sancre Tor she prayed to Akatosh for the liberation of her people, and the Time Dragon granted her Three Visions to guide her in this task. Though the road was long and filled with hardship, her faith sustained her. When at last all three visions had come to pass and her people were freed of Elven domination, her purpose was fulfilled and she was called to Apotheosis.

This is another retelling of the same event we get in the Song, from what I can tell – both talk about freedom, in some shape or form, and Alessia’s initial appeal. It also says about three visions which are fulfilled during the Rebellion. Pelinal is described as a “symbol” in the Song, so he’s one. I think it’s possible that Morihaus is another, but I’m at a loss for the third. Maybe that vision was freedom itself and the empire of Cyrodiil? I’m not sure on that one, but it seems to fit.

I’m a little inclined to disagree with the Catechism that it was Akatosh that was prayed to, if I’m honest. The text has no author, but it’s a catechism, a religious teaching. That, and that it is focused on Akatosh where the Song just refers to “the Dragon”, says to me that it’s likely to be a product of the Alessian Order, which was very keen to bring Akatosh to the fore and diminish other gods. They also claim that she was “called to Apotheosis” once the Ayleids were defeated. It smells a bit like Tiber’s official account, someone just “given” godhood at a convenient point in the narrative, while the truth is likely a bit more messy. Given that she’s also down as being the progenitors of the minotaurs in some quarters through a relationship with Morihaus, the Alessian Order, which On Minotaurs notes may have wanted to expunge minotaurs and other non-humans from the historical record, so removing the possibility of Alessia’s relationship with a non-human seems a perfectly characteristic piece of revisionism for the Order. That there were three visions is actually about all I’d trust about that piece, to be honest, because it’s one of the few things that the Order has no real motivation to tamper with. Plus, if it did happen, it’d have to happen really quickly; Alessia’s revolt starts in 1E 242, and ends a year later. Assuming a normal human gestation period for Belharza, that’s only a few months for the relationship between Alessia and Morihaus to form.

Despite all these inconsistencies, there has to have been a deal with Akatosh at some point, because Akatosh kept a barrier between Oblivion and Mundus sealed. This action is never associated with anyone else, so I think we can be fairly certain that there was a pact between Akatosh and Alessia at some point, we’re just not sure when or entirely in what circumstances.

Alessia also seems to have been quite the diplomat, bringing in Nords, Nedes and even some Ayleids into her cause, as well as having a good dose of either luck or planning with regard to her timing. The Last King of the Ayleids notes that:

The first two centuries of the First Era saw increasing strife between the great Ayleid lords of Cyrodiil. Alessia appears to have taken advantage of a period of civil war to launch her uprising. Imperial historians have traditionally attributed her victory to intervention from Skyrim, but it appears that she had at least as much help from rebel Ayleid lords during the siege of White Gold Tower.

If this is true, then Alessia took advantage of an already fractured Ayleid polity to secure human dominance over Cyrod. Whether she meant any ill will towards the Ayleids who aided her is unclear, as their persecution came later. Her actions elsewhere (such as the pacts with the Nords, and various entreaties to the gods, making her just as much a diplomat as a conqueror.Alessia & Mythopoeia

Part of that diplomacy and compromise is her founding of the Eight Divines pantheon. This happens after the end of the rebellion. Shezarr and the Divines puts it like this:

When Skyrim lends its armies to the Slave-Queen of the South, the revolution succeeds. The Ayleid Hegemonies are quickly overthrown. Shortly thereafter, White Gold Tower is captured by Alessia’s forces, and she promptly declares herself the first Empress of Cyrodiil. Part of the package meant that she had to become the High Priestess of Akatosh, as well. Akatosh was an Aldmeri god, and Alessia’s subjects were as-yet unwilling to renounce their worship of the Elven pantheon. She found herself in a very sensitive political situation. She needed to keep the Nords as her allies, but they were (at that time) fiercely opposed to any adoration of Elven deities. On the other hand, she could not force her subjects to revert back to the Nordic pantheon, for fear of another revolution. Therefore, concessions were made and Empress Alessia instituted a new religion: the Eight Divines, an elegant, well-researched synthesis of both pantheons, Nordic and Aldmeri.

This is the only text that states that Akatosh was an Aldmeri god; all other texts put Auri-El in that slot, and say it’s the Elven name for Akatosh, but never say that Akatosh is merish. Part of me wonders whether Auri-El became Akatosh with the renaming and rebranding of some Nordic gods into the Divines (Kyne is demoted and becomes Kynareth, Orkey becomes Arkay, Jhunal becomes Julianos etc), as the other part of the synthesis. I’ve heard some people say that this is a possible moment where Akatosh was created, rather than Auri-El being reshaped, the other possible moment of reshaping being when the Marukhati Selectives danced on the Tower. However, I’m not 100% convinced of that; I’d expect some serious sorcery to be undertaken as part of that, and Alessia was far more about appealing to the gods and dealing with them than manipulating them. It’s a possibility, though.

Rather, I think what Alessia did was something a bit more potent. She told stories. Different stories than had been told before, which reshaped reality in the telling, maybe? I’ve said before in a previous cast that I’m not convinced that Mythopoeia is “power gained from worship” in the sense of you believe something and it happens, but maybe if you tell the same story over and over, the universe believes it? It feels like a loose connection, but close to one that I’ve made before, which seems to make some sense.

Alessia’s Possible Inspiration

It also vaguely chimes with a possible inspiration for Alessia, and I have to thank one my patrons for pointing this out, so my thanks to Owain for noticing this parallel. He pointed out that Enheduanna may have been a possible inspiration for Alessia, which I think is closer than the more obvious Joan of Arc. Born in ancient Sumeria, daughter of Sargon of Akkad, Enheduanna was not a slave, but her father was supposedly born the son of a palace gardener. Enheduanna herself was a priestess and the first named author in history (“first of its kind” title, anyone?). She may have also engaged in a degree of religious syncretism, as ancient Mesopotamia’s pantheons lived on and shifted between different empires for quite a while. As MK has noted Gilgamesh as an inspiration for Pelinal, I think that Owain may be on to something with this particular parallel.Alessia’s Death

After the foundation of the Eight Divines and birthing Belharza, we hear little of Alessia before her death, and even that’s contested. We’ve already spoken about the Alessian Order’s attempts to claim that she ascended after the war. For all we know about her, she might well have done – my objection to that is the timeline of Belharza’s life, more than anything we know about Alessia. And the Catechism isn’t the only source to hint at a death that wasn’t quite a death. The last volume of the Song of Pelinal says this:

[Let us] now take you Up. We will [show] our true faces… [which eat] one another in amnesia each Age.”

Beyond having some interesting implications about the relationship between Lorkhan and Akatosh which I won’t go into here, being “taken up” suggests an ascension of sorts. We also have this from The Amulet of Kings:

In token of this Covenant, Akatosh gave to Alessia and her descendants the Amulet of Kings and the Eternal Dragonfires of the Imperial City. Thus does Alessia become the first gem in the Cyrodilic Amulet of Kings. The gem is the Red Diamond in the middle of the Amulet.

This implies that Alessia became the Amulet of Kings upon death. It makes it rather interesting as to what the Amulet of Kings actually is. Trials of Saint Alessia claims that:

Akatosh drew from his breast a burning handful of his Heart’s blood, and he gave it into Alessia’s hand, saying, ‘This shall also be a token to you of our joined blood and pledged faith. So long as you and your descendants shall wear the Amulet of Kings, then shall this dragonfire burn — an eternal flame — as a sign to all men and gods of our faithfulness.

This is the more traditional telling, that the Amulet is Akatosh’s blood, given as token of the pact to keep Oblivion shut. Then there’s Chim-El Adabal: A Ballad, which claims that it was blood from Lorkhan’s heart that had been turned into a gem by the Ayleids and then given by Akatosh after it existed. So there’s a good amount of confusion as to what the Amulet actually is. If we go by the forum thread Amulet, Amulet, Who Put Her in the Amulet, originally on the Bethesda Forums, it’s meant to be ambiguous to imply that, as we started this podcast, Shezarr and Akatosh are the same being.

Alessia being made into part of the Amulet of Kings seems to make sense in some ways, as, according to The Legendary Sancre Tor, her burial site is unknown, so it’s possible she doesn’t actually have a burial place.

Alessia as Saint and Symbol

Normally, I’d end things with a character’s death, but Alessia is one of the few where there’s a substantial carrying on of stuff after death. Alessia was revered as a saint by the Cyrodiils some time after her death, which in Elder Scrolls terms feels something like ancestor worship smashed into Catholic saint veneration. Various forms of it existed throughout Cyrod’s history, but nothing exactly clear that I can find apart from acts of commemoration. Saint Alessia, though, got more than this, thanks to the Alessian Order. The Order used the notion of sainthood as a way to keep but diminish other gods in their canon of worship, if you believe the first edition Pocket Guide. Here, Alessia was used as a symbol of proper hatred of the elves, an example to follow and venerate, despite her accommodation with the Ayleids that made the success of her rebellion possible.

It also feels like Alessia gets identified with the soil fo Cyrodiil itself – she’s called the Queen-ut-Cyrod in quite a few places, and gets equated with the land by the Prophet in the Knights of the Nine expansion to Elder Scrolls 4, who says this when talking about Reman:

I AM CYRODIIL COME, he said, Old Reman, born from the earth that IS Al-Esh, and yet he would scorn this country now!

This is referring to the event in the Remanada where King Hrol chases the spirit of Alessia and makes love to both it and a hillock at the same time.

And the spirit fled from them, and they split among hills and forests to find her, all grieving that they had become a villainous people. Hrol and his shieldthane were the only ones to find her, and the king spoke to her, saying, I love you sweet Aless, sweet wife of Shor and of Auri-el and the Sacred Bull, and would render this land alive again, not through pain but through a return to the dragon-fires of covenant, to join east and west and throw off all ruin. And the shieldthane bore witness to the spirit opening naked to his king, carving on a nearby rock the words AND HROL DID LOVE UNTO A HILLOCK before dying in the sight of their union.

Alessia and the land of Cyrodiil are therefore considered one and the same. This is why Reman and his propagandists linked Reman to both the land and the bloodline of Alessia. Beyond her death, she becomes a part of the makeup of Cyrodiil, a part of it that must be appeased in order to claim legitimacy. I was looking for references for Tiber claiming Alessian descent as well, but can’t see anything beyond his deliberate conquest of Sancre Tor to claim the Amulet of Kings.

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Numidium in Brief

The Numidium is basically a giant Tamrielic robot. That’s about all the commonality you’ll get between the various incarnations of the Numidium, which we’ll get to later. Most of what we’ll be talking about refers to a giant brass figure, built by the Dwemer and intended to become their new god, which may or may not have been meant to be the same thing as them. Ironically, it was never actually used by the Dwemer, but rather by Tiber Septim in his conquest of Tamriel, specifically against Summerset. It was then destroyed following the conquest of Tamriel, by Zurin Arctus. Then it was reassembled by the Blades until it was activated in 3E 417, causing the Warp in the West. From what we can tell, no versions of the Numidium survived that event. A Numidium was also supposedly responsible for the destruction of Nirn and its gods in the events of C0DA.

The Numidium is also considered to be one of the Towers, the Brass Tower, or Walk-Brass. I suppose that it would count as a Merethic Tower, as it was built by the Dwemer, but it doesn’t really fit into the strict categories for Towers, at least considering how it’s mobile and tends to be associated with destruction and negation by fans, rather than necessarily upholding Mundus. However, I’m not sure that’s entirely right. But we’ll get to that.

Numidium’s Creation

Out-of-Universe

In this world, the Numidium was originally created as an adjunct to a McGuffin for The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall. The McGuffin itself was the Totem of Tiber Septim, which was used to control the Numidium itself. The Numidium was conceived of as a giant golem, a war machine of sorts or a giant. We have a fusion of both in the introduction to the thing we get in Daggerfall:

Numidium was supposed to be a giant so big his hands could knock the moons from the sky. I do not recall from the stories whether Numidium was supposed to be good or bad, but the legends used to scare me as a child.

and then this outline from The Daggerfall Chronicles:

The Blades are a group of knights who work surreptitiously for the good of the empire all over Tamriel. Their goal is to repair the great iron golem, Numidium, which forcibly pulled the empire together hundreds of years before under the rule of Tiber Septim.

So at this stage we have the idea of the Numidium as a giant golem used to forge Tiber’s empire. However, the connection to the Dwemer wasn’t there. That only gets brought in with The Arcturian Heresy, from The Elder Scrolls 3. It’s not something that particularly has its own will, that’s what the Totem is for.

I think the bridging point between this older genesis and the one that gets made for the Numidium in Morrowind is Skeleton Man’s Interview with the Denizens of Tamriel, where Yul Marshee claims that “Numidium was the prize of all Dwarven war machines, ferreted out by the Blades, they say, and rebuilt in the laboratories of the Battlemages of Cyrodiil” and then dro’Mhakij says that the Hall of the Colossus was “where Big Walker was born”. These two have a fair bit of tension going on, although I think Marshee’s dialogue is the first attempt at establishing a Dwemeri origin for the Numidium.

In-Universe

Later games fill in the Numidium’s creation a lot more – that it was created by the Dwemer, as part of the harnessing of Lorkhan’s Heart by Kagrenac. I’ve talked about Dwemeri philosophy before on this podcast, so if you want the full treatment of how I understand Dwemer philosophy, go back and listen to episode 1 of this podcast. The Interview gives us some more hints about this, particularly the words of Xal, a “human Marukhati” in the Third Era, which should speak volumes for the changes to the lore that were going on in this world at the time.

Bearing that in mind, Xal says this:

The Brass God is Anumidum, the Prime Gestalt. He is also called the divine skin. He was meant to be used many times by our kind to transcend the Gray Maybe. Do not think as others do that Kagrenac created the Anumidum for petty motivations, such as a refutation of the gods. Kagrenac was devoted to his people, and the Dwarves, despite what you may have read, were a pious lot-he would not have sacrificed so many of their golden souls to create Anumidum’s metal body if it were all in the name of grand theater. Kagrenac had even built the tools needed to construct a Mantella, the Crux of Transcendence. But, by then, and for a long time coming, the Doom of the Dwarves marched upon the Mountain and they were removed from this world.

By this account, the Numidium was created as part of the Dwemer’s goal to transcend the limits of mortality, via the creation of a new god. There is a line in Dagoth Ur’s Plans that I think is at least the Temple’s perceptive on what the Numidium was supposed to be:

Establish a theocracy in Morrowind based on the worship of the new-born god Akulakhan [Second Numidium] to be created by Dagoth Ur from the heart of Lorkhan and a body constructed according to the principles and rituals pioneered by the Dwemer Kagrenac. Establish the ancient heirs of House Dagoth as the god-priests of Akulakhan, and the Sixth House of Dagoth Ur as the dominant political power in Morrowind. Through charismatic conversion, unite the Dunmer under the guidance of Dagoth Ur to battle against the foreign animals who hold Morrowind in subjection. [Note: Dagoth Ur has apparently adopted the views and motivations of the Dwemer High Craftlord Kagrenac. In effect, he recapitulates the ancient blasphemous folly of the Dwemer.]

This implies that the original purpose of the Numidium was something around a traditional god, in the sense of being worshipped, and being a vessel for “transcendence” of the Dwemer race. It wasn’t necessarily to combine all of the souls of the Dwemer at once in order to allow them to re-ascend. However, Baladas Demnevanni talks about “generations of ritualistic ‘anti-creations’”. If that’s true, it means that the Dwemer could have been using a partially-assembled to Numiduim to process their souls, and the final activation was just the capstone achievement. However, that does contradict some of the rumours we hear swirling about the Dwemer. The idea that they were making themselves gods is present in quite a few sources, but this also may have hints of making themselves immortal. Nerevar at Red Mountain states this outright:

House Dagoth had discovered the source of the profane and secret power of the Dwemer: the legendary Heart of Lorkhan, which Dumac’s people had used to make themselves immortal and beyond the measure of the gods. In fact, one of the their [sic] high priests, Kagrenac, was building a New God so that the Dwemer could claim Resdayn for their own.

The new god is, of course, Numidium. The key here is that they had used the Heart of Lorkhan to make themselves permanent, going against the idea of “ritualistic anti-creation” that Demnevani talks about. So they wouldn’t need the Numidium to make them gods; it’s explicitly linked to conquest. It’s a war machine, to the Ashlanders, similar to the original stories in Daggerfall. It’s just a thing to destroy all before it, rather than a machine to transcend.

Numidium and Transcendence

However, I’m inclined to go with the idea of it being a thing to transcend, an ascension machine, and most of the community have. The most obvious way of going with this is to think that the Dwemer were trying to become a new god, as stated in several sources. This is achieved by in Baladas Demnevanni’s words directly:

It was unfashionable among the Dwemer to view their spirits as synthetic constructs three, four, or forty creational gradients below the divine. During the Dawn Era they researched the death of the Earth Bones, what we call now the laws of nature, dissecting the process of the sacred willing itself into the profane. I believe their mechanists and tonal architects discovered systematic regression techniques to perform the reverse — that is, to create the sacred from the deaths of the profane.

This is the biggest clue that the act that made the Dwemer disappear was not an accident. In taking all the remaining Dwemer at once, it is melding them together into something sacred. Demnevanni also describes the book Divine Metaphysics as a book about “how the Dwemer tried to make a new god, Anumidium, using Kagrenac’s tools and the sacred tones on Lorkhan’s Heart.” Piecing those two things together, we can see that Demnevanni believes that Kagrenac was looking to make the Numidium into a god using tonal architecture and the souls of the Dwemer to do so, going back up from mortals to divines, reversing what had been done before.

Numidium and Dragon Breaks

It’s possible that this is achieved by the use of dragon breaks, which I think is the simplest answer. The Numidium is a dragon break machine; whenever it is turned on, there is a dragon break. There’s only one confirmed dragon break that happens in the series that didn’t involve Numidium being turned on, the Middle Dawn. Even that has some measure of being used for transcendence. Where Were You When the Dragon Broke? has Mannimarco claim that he “learned [his] mystery” from the Middle Dawn, when the Selectives broke the dragon by dancing on the Tower. Similarly, Vivec became a god in the possible dragon break at Red Mountain.

However, I’m not sure this is something that was necessarily an intended consequence of the Numidium’s design. We have this comment from MK that was made on the forums at one point:

It’s not the Brass God that wrecks everything so much as it is all the plane(t)s and timelines that orbit it, singing world-refusals.

This is more in line with the Numidium’s description in C0DA, where those plane(t)s do make an appearance, more than anything in the games. So I’m not totally sure that this was an intentional part of the Numidium’s design by the Dwemer. However, I know MK considered that the Dwemer engaged in the “heroic abrogation of everything”, which may be a philosophy that encourages world-refusal. It certainly sounds like it.

This is also part of where the Numidium being associated with negation and NO come from; that philosophy of world-refusal. This isn’t simple nihilism or solipsism; the Dwemer (and by extension the Numidium) don’t simply believe nothing matters or nothing else is real. They deny reality, but also their own existence. That puts both of those options off the table. The Numidium also seems to function as an escape of something, which implies that there is some level of escape from something. Scourgicus has posited that the Dwemer were attempting to use Numidium to achieve a form of collective amnesia, and both obliteration would serve that same function.

Numidium as a Walking Way

We don’t know much about how the Numidium was supposed to function as an ascension tool, even for something that causes a lot of dragon breaks. I’ve seen in the community that the Numidium was an expression of a possible Walking Way, most usually soul-stacking. This is got at through Sermon 36 of the 36 Lessons of Vivec, which says this:

Each of the aspects of the ALMSIVI then rose up together, combining as one, and showed the world the sixth path.

This has a particularly poetic twist as this action is part of defeating the Numidium, in the Lessons’ narrative. The Numidium being defeated by its own method of godhood. It’s also backed up to a degree by this passage from the Loveletter from the Fifth Era:

You in the Fourth Era have already witnessed many of the attempts at reaching the final subgradient of all AE, that state that exists beyond mortal death. The Numidium. The Endeavor. The Prolix Tower. CHIM. The Enantiomorph. The Scarab that Transforms into the New Man.

The most common interpretation of this list is that they are the Walking Ways. It’s also neat that there are six of them, in line with the “Six are the walking ways, from enigma to enemy to teacher” of Sermon Six of the 36 Lessons. However, I’m not sure this is the comprehensive list. Most particularly as the Psijic Endeavour is noted as a way to achieve CHIM by Michael Kirkbride in a forum post, rather than a distinct Walking Way in itself. I think it’s cooler if it’s its own thing, but it’s possible that it’s not.

There is also this line from Sermon Six:

There is a fourth kind of philosophy that uses nothing but disbelief

This has been taken as a possible thing that the Dwemer used or followed, because they’re the “atheists in a world where gods definitely exist”. Some people take this to be a Walking Way, although this does moderately contradict MK’s assertion that “the Stormcrown manted [sic] by way of the Fourth”, with reference to Tiber’s ascension via mantling. Either way, it’s possible that the Numidium was created with the intent of leveraging a Walking Way to ascend to godhood.

Numidium as a Crux of Transcendence

Or maybe something deeper is going on with how the Numidium was being used; that it’s not a Way in itself, but the gateway to a Way, or something similar. This comes from some ideas that were present around the time between TES2 and TES3. There were several ideas surrounding the Numidium and the concept of a Mantella at this time, with the Mantella of TES2 only being one example. In particular, we have it called a “Crux of Transcendence” in both Skeleton Man’s Interview. Exactly what this means is unclear, until we look at Made-Up Word Round Up, which is an old forum thread where a bunch of concepts got explored. In the Round Up, we have this:

We know Kagrenac made the tools to create a mantella, a Crux of Transcendence. (For those who don’t read the Tarot, the Hanged Man in Tarot symbolizes the Crux of Transcendence, suffering to gain transcendence: Jesus on the cross, Odin hanging from the tree to gain wisdom, etc.)

As well as echoing Lorkhan’s suffering in order to create Mundus, this may hint at the ultimate fate of the Dwemer, and the purpose of the Numidium. In putting the Dwemer through some form of suffering, Kagrenac may have made them into the Numidium in order to make them suffer. The word “mantella” now effectively means the big green gem that Tiber Septim used to power the Numidium during his wars of conquest, but if we take this broader meaning into account, we have some other more funky things going on with regard to the Numidium’s creation.

If the Numidium was meant to be a crux of transcendence, a place to put the Dwemer through suffering to gain transcendence, that puts a very different spin on things compared to the idea of simply smashing all the Dwemer back together and they then become some sort of divine brass Voltron. Maybe it’s not in becoming the Numidium itself that the Dwemer are intended to become a god or gods, but instead through the suffering inflicted on them by becoming the Numidium.

Whatever the Dwemer were trying to accomplish with the Numidium, it’s clear that the Numidum didn’t “activate”. I’ve seen it suggested that the Numidium has ended up as “Dwemeri hell”, in an interesting piece by Scourgicus, and this agrees with that in broad terms. However, while Scourgicus’ piece suggests that the Numidium is seeking self-annihilation (and through that the annihilation of the Dwemer) in order to forget that they do not really exist, I’m going to take a slightly different tack.

It’s not precisely “Dwemeri hell”, but rather “Dwemeri purgatory” – the souls of the Dwemer exist in Numidium for the purpose of cleansing their souls for their eventual transcendence. In this, they’re acting a little like Daedra who are bound into ebony to form Daedric weapons and armour, who apparently suffer in the process; according to Garothmuk gro-Muzgub in TES3:

Daedric weapons are made from raw ebony which has been refined using the craft and magical substances of the lesser minions of Oblivion. The process is not a pleasant one for the Daedra involved, and the weapons retain echoes of preternaturally prolonged suffering endured during manufacture.

If the process of the creation of the Numidium is the same for the Dwemer, I think it certainly qualifies as suffering, through which they can achieve transcendence. Or maybe it is something more akin to Vivec’s time with Molag Bal during the Pomegranate Banquet, that it is through being used by others that the transcendence is achieved.

Numidium as a Tower

Regardless of its relation to the Walking Ways, the Numidium is definitely referred to as a Tower, which can associate it with deeper magic in some ways, and probably transcendence if you handwave things. Numidium is the Brass Tower, or Walk-Brass. It’s also slightly odd as a Tower, because for one thing it’s mobile, but for another it’s often talked about as a thing destroying the world, while Towers are explicitly linked with maintaining the world.

It fits if we consider a Tower (or at least Merethic Towers) to be things that point towards their culture’s view of transcendence and godhood; Crystal-Like-Law is a remembrance of the Aldmer, Green-Sap remembers the possibilities and mutabilities of the Dawn, Red-Heart… isn’t such a great fit, but it could be a link to Lorkhan’s original plan and the Tri-Angled Truth (it certainly becomes that with Dunmeri theology), and White-Gold strives to imitate and manipulate the entire Aurbis. Numidium fits into that mix by being an expression of the Dwemer denying the world and recombining to become a god again. That doesn’t fit if you consider Towers to be imitations of Ada-Mantia and its purpose of commemorating the mortal plane, because Numidium is an escape route from that, but there is one source that strongly implies this about the Numidium. That source is The Truth in Sequence.

The Truth in Sequence describes Numidium like this in volume 5:

But most profane is this: the walking horror that bears the Name, NM. The Brass Tower of Vanity. The mindless guardian of the Nirn-Prior. The Antipodal-God-Thing that reigns on the darkest pole of the sacred Nirn-Sphere. Of all the threats to Tamriel Final, NM is the greatest. Anuvanna’si. The Daedra can be banished in thought, but NM must be sundered on Nirn. It is the welded knot at the center of Anu that must be untied. The God-Puzzle.

This describes the Numidium as both a Tower, and the keeper of what came before. This runs counter to the idea that the Numidium is meant to move beyond Mundus, and that it is meant to destroy things. Unless it’s an echo of things to come in C0DA, where the Numidium destroys things enough that the world of Nirn remains as a lifeless husk, without the ability to move forward. This would both preserve the world and destroy it, in a sense.

It’s this sort of juxtaposition that has led several fans to consider the Numidium to be Anuic, that is a force for stasis in the Elder Scrolls universe. The fans tend to associate the Numidium with NO, with negation, mostly thanks to its portrayal in C0DA. That sense of stasis-as-preservation may well be what Deldrise is driving at, although it would be a change in tone from the rest of the text, because The Truth in Sequence generally considers “Anuic unity” to be a good thing. It’s possible that this is a cultural hangover of a hatred of the Dwemer, but I think it’s more than that. It’s that the Numidium won’t be ending the world to bring about something better, it’s possible that it would end the world to bring about nothing. That certainly fits with the more nihilistic interpretations of Dwemer philosophy, but that’s only one perspective on it. It’s one I share, as I think one way to get to the unity and parity that the Dwemer crave is to annihilate all other perspectives (if you want to see more on what my reasoning for that is, give The Many-Faceted Pool a read), but I’m aware that this isn’t the only answer out there, particularly given how varied the uses and reinterpretations of Numidium has had throughout its history.Numidium and Others

With that, it’s probably time that we talked about the Numidium being used by others, because the Dwemer have been far from the only ones to use this behemoth throughout its history.

Numidium & Mannimarco

I also want to clear up a quick misconception about using the Numidium to achieve godhood. Some people will claim that Mannimarco used the Numidium to become a god. That’s not entirely correct. What actually happens at the end of The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall if you give the Totem of Tiber Septim to Mannimarco is this:

The Mantella is hurled from Aetherius. Although drawn to the empty chest of great Numidium, the will of the King of Worms commands it to his side. With its power the King of Worms leaves his mortal frame and joins the ranks of the Gods of Oblivion.

This isn’t Mannimarco using the Numidium, as some might talk about (I may have been one of them at some point or another). Having the Toten allowed Mannimarco to restrain Numidium in order to be able to claim the power of the Mantella, not the Numidium, in order to become a god.

Numidium & Tiber Septim

Tiber Septim used the Numidium in what is possibly the most boring way you could use a metal god-thing; he used it to lay siege to Alinor and conquer Tamriel. The majority of it was secured in the Armistice that was signed with the Tribunal in order to end the Four Score War, but from some of the language in The Arcturian Heresy, I think it’s possible that other parts were secured from somewhere else; that text says that “Pieces of Numidium trickle in, though”, which implies that he didn’t get it all in one lump. Exactly where else the other bits of it went I have no idea, seeing as it wasn’t exploded or anything during the Battle of Red Mountain. Maybe bits of it were stolen over the years? It’s not exactly clear.

However the Numidium was sourced, Tiber re-assembled it in the Halls of the Colossus, which one sources claims were built for the purpose, but quite obviously exist during the Interregnum in Elder Scrolls: Online gameplay. Again brushing the uncertainty aside, it seems that turning it on made Rimmen radioactive. The Khajiit dro’Mhakij says this about its activation in Skeleton Man’s Interview:

Talos, he “annexed” a swath of our bounty-land in Ana’quinal and cleared the Khajiiti out by force. There’s where he built the Hall of Colossus—a mighty name for a secret testing warehouse—and that’s where Big Walker was born. And that’s why that part of our Elsweyr is still poisoned glow-rock, where no cats go.

That sounds a lot like the Numidium’s activation also produced the magical equivalent of a nuclear wasteland. In addition to this, it caused a dragon break. In Where Were You When the Dragon Broke, the Tender to the Mane says this:

We’ll give you credit: you broke Alkosh something fierce, and that’s not easy. Just don’t think you solved what you accomplished by it, or can ever solve it. You did it again with Big Walker, not once, but twice! Once at Rimmen, which we’ll never learn to live with.

We’ll get to the Numidium and dragon breaks in detail a little later, but I want to make a note of it here, because it’s part of Tiber’s involvement. Not only is it a war golem now, it’s very explicitly a nuclear weapon within Tamriel’s context. The parallels are a little on-the-nose in this case, but it applies elsewhere as well. And yes, we’ll get to those.

There was also some other tampering that seems to have gone on with the Numidium at this point, because its activation and control mechanism changes. The events of The Elder Scrolls 2 are not around the recovery of the Numidium itself, but its “control rod”, the Totem of Tiber Septim. This was a thing that could only be used by Tiber, his descendents or powerful mages to control the Numidium. We have no evidence of any such control rod outside of The Elder Scrolls 2, so I’m inclined to think it’s something that Zurin Arctus retrofitted into the Numidium during its rebuilding in the Hall of Colossus. This also implies that, when it was originally conceived, the Numidium was meant to be self-directing. Probably. Although whether it was meant to derive its motive force from the Dwemer that combined with it or the motivations of the Heart of Lorkhan is an open question. There’s a rich vein of speculation centred around the Numidum’s link to the Heart that essentially says that the Dwemer were somehow co-opted, imprisoned or otherwise sucked away by Lorkhan because of the presence of the Heart in its construction, but we have very little evidence to support this. However, I think given that the Mantella was used to activate it and Zurin Arctus exercised very little control over the Numidium when it was activated, that Lorkhan’s motivations may not have featured heavily in the Dwemer’s intentions for the Numidium.

Although most sources will say Tiber only deployed the Numidium against Summerset, we have this from the introduction to The Elder Scrolls 2 that suggests it was used not only to crush multiple opponents, but also to quell rebellions that arose after Tamriel was conquered:

The Mantella was infused with the life force of Tiber Septim’s Imperial Battlemage, and with it, Septim crushed all who stood in his way. After the complete and total defeat of all his opponents, Septim began using Numidium to crush the neutral royal families of Tamriel so that he could enthrone only persons he knew to be loyal.

Were it not that this was the reason that is given for Zurin Arctus destroying the Numidium, I really want to ignore this. Not because I want to paint Tiber as more saintly, but simply because it feels so mundane. You have a god-mecha at your command, and you use it to stamp out rebellions? I guess at this point it was just a giant stompy robot and not a god-mecha, but still, it bothers me.

We have a hint of this, or something like this, in volume 2 of The Real Barenziah, which says this:

The little girl blinked back tears and waved bravely with one hand, her favorite stuffed toy animal, a gray wolf cub she called Wuffen, clutched to her breast with the other. She had never been parted from her parents before and had no idea what it meant, save that there was war in the west and the names Tiber Septim and Symmachus were on everyone’s lips, spoken with hate and dread. “Barenziah!” The soldiers cried, lifting their lances and swords and bows. Then her dear parents turned and rode away, soldiers trailing in their wake until the palace was near emptied. Some time after came a day when Barenziah was shaken awake by her nurse, dressed hurriedly and carried from the palace. All she remembered of that dreadful time was seeing a huge shadow with burning eyes that filled the sky. (emphasis added)

I wanted the whole of that passage because it helps us situate when this is happening. This is when Tiber Septim first comes to Mournhold, that is when he first conquers it. If this was happening after Mournhold was conquered, then the names wouldn’t be new, or as dreadful, in my view. There are other hints, when Tiber Septim speaks to Barenziah of a united Tamriel, that that vision hadn’t been realised yet.

The last section is what I want to focus on, though; that huge shadow and those burning eyes. That sounds like an Elder Scrolls 2-era description of the Numidium to me. Nothing else Tiber had at his command was that big, or that ominous. However, it was used to attack Mournhold. This isn’t possible if Tiber only gets the Numidium after the Armistice. There is a possibility that my assumptions about the timing of Numidium’s attack are wrong, and this was part of the subjugation of disloyal nobles, but I don’t think the rest of the narrative of The Real Barenziah supports that. It would be the cleanest way to deal with the inconsistency, though.

We have very few details of what happened at the Siege of Alinor from in-universe sources, we do have this little nugget from one of MK’s forum posts:

The Surrender of Alinor happened in one hour, but Numidium’s siege lasted from the Mythic Era until long into the Fifth. Some Mirror Logicians of the Altmer fight it still in chrysalis shells that phase in and out of Tamrielic Prime, and their brethren know nothing of their purpose unless they stare too long and break their own possipoints.

Given that the Numidium caused a dragon break when it was switched on, this seems perfectly plausible to me. However, we see no trace of this in Elder Scrolls: Online, so it may not have happened that way. It’s another part of the nuggets that build the picture of the Numidium as a dragon break machine, which could also result in multiple Numidiums. It almost has to for the rest of what happens to the Numidium to make sense if the Siege of Alinor continues until the Fifth Era, because stuff happens with the Numidium after the Tiber Wars.

The Numidium gets destroyed after Tiber’s initial wars of conquest, by Zurin Arctus. The Arcturian Heresy says this:

After its work on Summerset Isle a new threat appears — a rotting undead wizard who controls the skies. He blows the Numidium apart. But it pounds him into the ground with its last flailings, leaving only a black splotch. The Mantella falls into the sea, seemingly forever.

This is strongly implied in the Heresy’s narrative to be the Underking, Zurin Arctus. By this account, the Numidium is destroyed for personal reasons. Revenge against Tiber Septim, or a failed attempt to reclaim his soul being the most likely ones in my opinion. The motivations presented in The Elder Scrolls 2 itself are somewhat different. The player’s initial correspondent states that:

After the complete and total defeat of all his opponents, Septim began using Numidium to crush the neutral royal families of Tamriel so that he could enthrone only persons he knew to be loyal. His Imperial Battlemage was furious at this use of his creation, and fought to reclaim the Mantella. In the ensuing battle, both the created and the creator were vanquished: the heart they shared blown out of this reality into the netherworld they call Aetherius. Numidium’s body was scattered throughout Tamriel and the Imperial Battlemage, without his life force went into a semi-slumber in a subterranean vault.

This puts the disagreement between Tiber and Zurin as one of principle. It’s essentially like Tiber pointing a nuke at his subject peoples and telling them to behave, which Zurin doesn’t think should happen. However, for this to be true, it seems like there should be some evidence that it was deployed against Tiber’s new empire. Even the correspondence doesn’t actually detail any deployments, so I’m not sure what to make of it.

Numidium & the Iliac Bay

The key takeaway here is that the Numidium is destroyed. After that, the Blades then spend a bunch of time gathering up the pieces to reassemble it, and we get the plot of The Elder Scrolls 2. The end result being that the Numidium is activated again, and causes a dragon break. This was the original dragon break in terms of the series’ ideation; the concept of dragon breaks was invented after The Elder Scrolls 2 to reconcile the multiple possible endings to the game. I’ve covered dragon breaks themselves in one of the first episodes of this podcast, if you want to check out the concept in more detail.

In essence, the dragon break meant that all possible factions in the Iliac Bay got to use the Numidium at once, establishing themselves as a dominant player in the region. This was the Warp in the West, or to use another term for it, the Miracle of Peace. This is where the comparison between the Numidium and nuclear weapons gets its second wind – that peace was brought by the deployment of a destructive force not seen on Tamriel for many ages. Like the use of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which has, in theory at least, brought about peace between the world’s various nuclear powers. You’ll notice that, following the Warp in the West, no single power dominates the Iliac Bay, despite what actually happens at the end of the game. Their mutual use of the Numidium holds each other in check. Much like the theory of nuclear peace.

After the Warp in the West, the Numidium is destroyed again, as the timelines all converge once more. We don’t know precisely how, but there’s no mention of the Numidium being present after that point.

Numidium & Dagoth Ur

Despite this, we get a version of Numidium surfacing again in The Elder Scrolls 3, and Dagoth Ur constructing Akulakhan, called a “second Numidium” in a few places. According to Dagoth Ur’s Plans, Akulakhan was “constructed according to the principles and rituals pioneered by the Dwemer Kagrenac”, although quite what that means I’m not sure. When we see Akulakhan in the game it’s built around the Heart of Lorkhan, presumably in the same way that the original was. However, we get no indication that it was using pieces of the original, and from what we can see, Akulakhan looks much more organic than the Numidium; there’s actual bone-like ribs and a spine that we can see when the Nerevarine is in the Heart Chamber. This is probably because it’s using whatever materials that Dagoth Ur had to hand which, I guess, was the malleable form of corprus monsters more than it was the metal of the Dwemer’s original construction.

That means that the “principles” of the Numidium’s construction may well be as much philosophical as anything else, if we are to believe the opinion of the Tribunal Temple on the matter. I know that’s a very questionable thing to do, so I don’t lay a huge amount of stock in it, but if that’s the case then Akulakhan would have been a reiteration of the philosophy that led to the original Numidium. Or maybe a changing up of it; Dagoth Ur’s goal of subsuming everything within the Blight seems quite different from the Dwemer’s intent with the Numidium. That is, assuming that the Numidium was a transcendence device. If the Numidium was intended as a simple war machine, then it could be in line with it, given that Dagoth Ur says that:

“Akulakhan will serve three purposes. First, it will be the champion of my armies, liberating first Vvardenfell, then Morrowind, and then, perhaps the rest of Tamriel. Second, it will serve as a sower and cultivator of the divine substance derived from the Heart. Three, it will serve as the prominent banner and symbol of our cause — to defy the Empire, to liberate mortals from ancient superstitions, and to glorify our crusade against the gods.”

It is possible that the Dwemer intended the Numidium to be a war golem, but we have little indication of that. Dagoth Ur’s dialogue also indicates that while he does intend the Numidium to be a disperser of the Blight, whicht makes his view much broader than that of the Dwemer. Dagoth’s intentions for the Blight are this:

I will continue to broadcast divine power upon the blight winds, so that it will touch each soul in Vvardenfell, and then more broadly, across the waters to the rest of Morrowind and Tamriel. In time, every mortal in Tamriel shall feel the liberating contact with the divine.

This is essentially saying he’ll spread the Blight, that is corprus, to everyone on Tamriel. For the original Numidium, we only have indications that it was meant to be used on and by the Dwemer. Akulakhan was thus intended to be a more universal form of ascension, if I can put it that way, than the Dwemer’s original designs. I don’t think the Dwemer ever meant for the rest of Mundus to join them in becoming a god.

Numidium & Itself (C0DA)

It’s fitting, then, that the final iteration of Numidium is one where it stands more or less alone. That final iteration, as far as I’m concerned, is C0DA. In C0DA, the Numidium has destroyed Nirn. It doesn’t seem to have any connection to anything other than itself; the Numidium seems to have its own motive power, and not be reliant on anything much to do with the Dwemer. It’s also seemingly got a bunch more in the way of “powers”, with the ability to delete whole ancestral lines from existence, if we take the Ancestroscythe as a literal weapon. I guess this was derived from the Numidium’s ability to cause dragon breaks? It essentially makes it possible to delete whole genealogies. When you can break time at will, you can potentially do things to those beings subject to it.

This is where most of the stuff about the Numidum being associated with negation comes from, with the NO of Numidium emerging in the build-up to C0DA among the fandom, particularly the Prophet of Landfall. The Numidium takes on the role of the Nothing, which isn’t necessarily the same thing as being a void. Bear in mind that Nirn in C0DA is clockwork, not an absence of things altogether.

This kind of reminds me of how ancient cosmologies see a pre-order Cosmos (full credit to Bible Project for this illustration, by the way); they didn’t conceive of the pre-Creation order as a space with literally nothing in it, as the modern secular mindset would have it. For them (“them” being ancient Babylonians, Egyptians and the Hebrews), pre-creation disorder is symbolised by an ocean, which the chief deity brings order to in various ways. I’m wondering if the Numidium’s NO could be something similar, an infliction of a “nothing” that is different to our concept of nothing. I’ve also seen it mentioned in programming language terms, that “nothing” can be rendered as both 0 and NULL, which are different things.It’s possible that there’s an “end of line” hint here too, if we take a look at the metatextual meaning of the Numidium in C0DA. In one of the original C0DA discussion threads from 2014, Toesock states this, as part of a statement which was approved of by MK, so I’ll claim some degree of author approval, or possible intent:

Numidium represents the non-contributor who sits back and nay-says everyone else’s ideas intead [sic] of inventing their own Tamriel.

This reinforces that notion of the “end of the line”, but not necessarily in a programming sense. It’s the “end of discussion” because, in the Anuic sense, if everything is set in stone nothing can move. Nothing can be expressed. The Numidium’s world-refusals become refusal of everyone else’s worlds, everyone else’s Tamriel. It also seems that those refusals may have become its undoing, as Jubal used its own lack of speech, its own NO, to destroy it.

Many Numidiums/Numidia?

The Numidium’s association with Anu has led to a possible other name for Numidium, which was expressed as a rephrasing of its name in Skeleton Man’s Interview: Anumidum. This has been picked up and run with by fans, as a hint towards the stasis that Anu represents. This, via wordplay like matching Numidium with “new medium” has led to some interesting thoughts about Numidium’s position as a possible reflection of Anu. We’ve already discussed a bit about Numidium’s relationship to stasis, but that naming convention makes it explicit.Rather ironically, I think this should finish on the reflection that there are several different Numidiums (Numidia?). Thanks to it being rebuilt, reused, repurposed, imitated and resurrected, the thing that stands for annihilation, nothingness and similar concepts, has become something with myriad ends and purposes. I think the only real constant is that Numidium is used as a tool of control, either by itself or others. The supreme irony being, maybe, that it hasn’t been able to control itself.

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The Psijics in Brief The Psijic Order are a group of mages in The Elder Scrolls, potentially the oldest on Tamriel, if you believe the claims made in Fragment: On Artaeum. The same text also claims they’re a “monastic order”, which also has a faith or several practices that are something close to a religion. The Order has its home in the island of Artaeum, which is, when it’s on Tamriel, accounted among the Summerset Isles, but the island has occasionally phased out of existence at various times, either by becoming insubstantial or leaving Mundus altogether.

Despite their relative isolation, they do have a fair amount of influence across Nirn, at least at certain portions of the order’s history. The book The Old Ways exhorts Psijics to provide “grave and faithful counsel” to the rulers of Tamriel, which is where they get much of their influence and reputation from. They are also some of the most powerful mages on Nirn, which On Artaeum claims is in fact distinct from magicka itself, a claim which we’ll get to in a bit.

Psijic Philosophy Despite their reputation as powerful mages, the Psijics don’t see that as the end goal of their way of doing things. They see, or at least have seen, it as an outflowing of their way of life. The text Mysticism: The Unfathomable Voyage puts it like this:

The Psijics of the Isle of Artaeum have a different term for Mysticism: the Old Way. The phrase becomes bogged in semantic quagmire because the Old Way also refers to the religion and customs of the Psijics, which may or may not be part of the magic of Mysticism.

It seems that it’s somewhat difficult to tell it apart, because the Psijics are producing effects like magic, but which may not be magic, in stead being far more dependent on an individual’s mindset than your usual spells. The On Artaeum fragment puts it like this:

The Elder Way is a philosophy of meditation and study said to bind the forces of nature to the individual will. It differs from magicka in origin, but the effects are much the same.

This could also explain why mages that study mysticism more broadly can’t get predictable effects. The discipline itself is possibly part of a practice that is far more dependent on an individual and their state of being than magicka, to the extent that it’s not really magicka at all, but another kind of theosophy altogether.

The out-of-universe explanation for that is, I think that the Psijics were hinted at being psychic. The names are similar enough, and I remember hearing that MK had once said he put the Psijic Order in in order to stop people putting psychic powers into The Elder Scrolls. Writing off psychic powers as an unidentified form of magic is an elegant way of cutting them off, even if the Psijics’ capabilities and doctrine has gone beyond that.

The Place of the Ancestors The basis of those practices goes back to the original form of ancestor worship practiced on Summerset. The Third Edition Pocket Guide to the Empire says this:

Gradually, as [Aldmer] society grew, social stratification increased. A hierarchy of classes began to form, which is still largely enforced in Summerset to this day. At the top are the Wise, teachers and priests, followed by the Artists, Princes, Warriors, Landowners, Merchants, and Workers. Below Workers were the beasts, such as the enslaved goblins, who the Aldmer used to perform the jobs beneath the dignity of the very least of them. The religion of the people also changed because of this change in society: no longer did the Aldmer worship their own ancestors, but the ancestors of their "betters." Auriel, Trinimac, Syrabane, and Phynaster are among the many ancestor spirits who became Gods. A group of elders rebelled against this trend, calling themselves the Psijics, the keepers of the Old Ways of Aldmeris. With their mystical powers, they were able to settle in Arteaum [sic], away from what they considered the corruption of their society.

This is primarily expressed in a continuation of worship of all ancestors on Tamriel, rather than just those that the current people deem “worthy” in some way. The Psijics’ worldview seems to incorporate that idea of ancestor worship into the nature of Mundus more than any other religion on Tamriel. This strikes me as being similar to Shinto in some ways. It’s not precisely the same, though, because the kami aren’t necessarily ancestors, but they are seen as the spirits of place in an almost animistic sense. The Old Ways puts it like this:

What, after all, is the origin of these spiritual forces that move the invisible strings of Mundus? Any neophyte of Artaeum knows that these spirits are our ancestors -- and that, while living, they too were bewildered by the spirits of their ancestors, and so on back to the original Acharyai. The Daedra and gods to whom the common people turn are no more than the spirits of superior men and women whose power and passion granted them great influence in the afterworld.

If this is an understanding that is applied to how the Psijics view the world, their rituals are not really magic, but instead conversations with the spirits of the ancestors, which is how the Psijics think about the Earthbones. Possibly. The term “Acharyai” may stop a little short of that. The term appears in one other in-universe text, Skeleton Man’s Interview with the Denizens of Tamriel. The portion of the Interview that uses the word appears as the book Changed Ones, which uses the term “Aldmer” instead of “Alcharyai”. However, given that the Psijics are inclined to worship all of their ancestors, rather than “the ancestors of their betters”, it’s possible that the Psijics consider “aldmer” and “Aedra” as synonymous. If that’s the case, then their religion involves communing with the Earthbones and a whole variety of other spirits. If not, then the following thoughts about the nature of Psijic magic may need some other basis. I personally think the aldmer-as-Aedra explanation fits too well to not be the case.

Those religions and customs are seen as the same thing as Psijic magic, from what I can tell. As we’ve already seen, mysticism is already close in nature to the customs of the Psijics, which may be the same thing. We have this line from On Artaeum too:

The Elder Way is a philosophy of meditation and study said to bind the forces of nature to the individual will. It differs from magicka in origin, but the effects are much the same.

So the Old Ways are a direct conversation with the spirits that make up the physical laws of Mundus, without the need for magicka. This sounds a lot like the account of Alteration magic in Reality and Other Falsehoods, but doesn’t To make things a little clearer, we have this line from Iachesis in ESO: Summerset:

There is very little we cannot accomplish through the application of the Old Ways. Every object remembers its history. The trick involves selecting the correct ritual to reveal those buried memories.

This dialogue, apart from sounding a bit like the idea of homeopathy for Tamriel, makes me think that the Psijics’ use of the Old Way is similar to Shinto, as I’ve already mentioned. In Shinto (from my limited understanding), various rituals are performed to appease the kami, which is variously translated as spirits, gods, but also may refer to the divine nature of the world itself. It’s a very fluid term. Apply this to The Elder Scrolls, where the world is made up of the combined sacrifice of the ancestor spirits, and even things like Shinto ritual purity take on this element, where the acharyai and the world are the same thing. I could be very off-base here, as my understanding of Shinto is very basic, so please let me know if there’s a better way to understand this, or if I’m wrong in any way.

The Eleven Forces One thing that seems somewhat distinct from the ancestor worship element of the Order is the Eleven Forces. These are only referenced in a handful of places, but there’s been various ways they’ve been stitched together into a coherent whole, from the pieces we have.

From what I can see, we have Change as the most sacred of the Eleven Forces in The Old Ways, which the Psijic Crafting Motif expands to 3 unnamed Kinetic Forces, and the Middle Forces of Balance, Envelopment and Contemplation. The UESP has the others listed as Memory, Time, the Rites of Moawita and Stasis, on the basis of what’s included in the Psijic skill line, along with the assumption of Deflection and Absorption being 2 of the 3 Kinetic Forces, based on how they’re talked about in the Psijic Crafting Motif. I think Deflection and Absorption are possible, but not definite.

I’m also not sure of a few of these on a conceptual level. I guess it’s elegant to have Change and Stasis as opposing forces, but I’m not sure that Stasis is a force in and of itself. We don’t really have much of an indication of what constitutes a “force”, as the examples of the Middle Forces are all over the place as concepts, particularly “envelopment”. Similarly I’m not sure if Memory and Time should coexist, although I can certainly see Memory having a separate existence as the possibility of water being memory is a thing. And the Rite of Moawita... feels like a leap. Lawrence Shick did comment that the Psijic skill line in ESO did use the Eleven Forces, and I think that’s fairly intuitively the case for things like Time, but I don’t think that necessarily applies to the Rite of Maowita. It’s a ritual, but is it a force in itself? Or are the rituals expressions of the Eleven Forces, with the Forces themselves being something deeper? That’s what it feels like to me, but I have little to back that up.

Regardless of the precise nature of the Eleven Forces, they feel like expression of the PSJJJJ, from which the order takes its name in-universe. The unlicensed text Vehk’s Teaching notes that the Order was formed not just from the ancestor worship split, but from a heterodox perspective on Anu and Padomay:

It is interesting to note that their original views were very unorthodox for Altmer, and thus their exile from Alinor. These views included the suggestion that Anu’s son, the Time Dragon, was formed in reaction to Padhome’s influence. In effect, Anu had finally done something. This inconceivable effect gave rise to an equally inconceivable cause, and so PSJJJJ was named and the Order eventually took his name.

Notice that this is entirely the wrong way round in terms of causality: the effect gives rise to the cause. It’s possible that the Eleven Forces are expressions of things in a similar vein; that the Psijics see things not in terms of simple causality, but the nature and relation of those causes (in the sense of their disposition, relative position and relation before, during and after any given event) also determines what those causes are. So PSJJJJ is not just a reaction, it is Anu’s reaction, which changes the nature of what the effect or cause is. It would not be PSJJJJ if it happened to another pair of beings, in other words. That might explain why the Forces are in what I would consider to be subdivisions or subsets of the same overall force. Envelopment and Balance for example, don’t really feel like “forces” to me, but states. However, if we have the actors determining the nature of the forces at play by their very existence, then the differences in determination between an Envelopment, a Surrounding or an Encircling may become causally important on some level.

This would also play into the ancestor worship, if you’ll indulge me in some entirely baseless speculation off my own conjecture for a moment. If the nature of the causer affects the effect, then appeasing the causer or getting another causer to to cause a given effect is vitally important to the outcome, and so negotiating with the ancestors is an inherent part of bringing about a desired effect. This makes the entire of the Old Way’s rituals a complex set of negotiations with the various spirits that makes up reality.

The Psijic Organisation & Mission The Psijics are a mysterious organisation, and we get glimpses of what they are in The Elder Scrolls Online: Summerset, but even then they seem to be past their best. Artaeum has a bunch of ruins that are effectively areas that have fallen into disuse, which makes me think that the place was designed to be more inhabited than it is by the time of ESO. I don’t want to make inferences on overall membership from what we see in ESO because lore ≠ gameplay, but I get the feeling from the various texts we have, and the state of Artaeum during the Interregnum, the feeling of a small cloistered organisation is not intended to be the norm for the Psijic Order. There are ruins on Artaeum, for starters. Why would things have been allowed to be in such disrepair if the Order was operating at full capacity? Iachesis is noted to draw the Psijic Order back at various points in history, for reasons that we never get fully explained, but several texts imply that’s not the intended condition of the Order.

Exactly how many Psijics there actually are is difficult to say, because several sources note their selection processes are somewhat obscure. They are noted to pick their members based on their ability, rather than the “can you pay?” philosophy of the Mages Guild. The Psijics are much more... hand-picked. Quite why each member is picked isn’t exactly clear, but it lends itself to a more mission-oriented organisation.

That organisation is also small. We never get exact numbers, but there is this nugget from the Pocket Guide to the Empire, Third Edition:

The Imperial Geographical Society is not allowed to visit Artaeum to survey and document it, but there is little doubt that the Psijic Order is increasingly popular among the young, and is willing to exploit this. Over the past thousand years, only seventeen new initiates were brought into the order. In the past two years, however, another thirty have joined.

With the organisation only having seventeen new members in a thousand years, and thirty coming onboard in two years being portrayed as a large step-up, means that the organisation has to be very small. That’s not necessarily a problem when most of the members are Altmer, and therefore live for centuries even when not augmented by magic, but it means the Psijics have to extend their influence beyond their physical presence.

This is also emphasised by the Psijics’ main source of their power: politics. While the Psijics do practice a lot of magic, or at least magical effects, their primary tool in creating change is in advising and counselling rulers, giving advice and manoeuvering them in particular directions. Celarus, a previous Loremaster of the Psijics, quotes another Psijic to explain this, in The Old Ways:

Perhaps the sage Taheritae said it best: "In Mundus, conflict and disparity are what bring change, and change is the most sacred of the Eleven Forces. Change is the force without focus or origin. It is the duty of the disciplined Psijic ["Enlightened One"] to dilute change where it brings greed, gluttony, sloth, ignorance, prejudice, cruelty... [here Taheritae lists the rest of the 111 Prodigalities], and to encourage change where it brings excellence, beauty, happiness, and enlightenment.

However, there is nothing in the book about the need to bring about change by the use of magic. Celarus puts this in towards the end of the book, which has before this point been talking about the Psijics’ religion and their duty towards others, to highlight how changing people is the greater necessity, and more effective. Celarus describes even the Order’s preferred way of dealing with despots as one that is involved in shaping character:

“We recognize the multiple threats that a strong tyrant represents -- breeds cruelty which feeds the Daedra Boethiah and hatred which feeds the Daedra Vaernima; if he should die having performed a particularly malevolent act, he may go to rule in Oblivion; and worst of all, he inspires other villains to thirst after power and other rulers to embrace villainy. Knowing this, we have developed patience in our dealings with such despots. They should be crippled, humiliated, impoverished, imprisoned. Other counsellors may advocate assassination or warfare -- which, aside from its spiritual insignificance, is expensive and likely to inflict at least as much pain on the innocents as the brutish dictator.

I think this explains a lot about how the Psijics work. If changing the character of a person is more important than whether they live or die, then the exile of Mannimarco suddenly makes a lot more sense - if the Psijics don’t want him to attain more understanding of their world but instead to experience failure and ruin before he dies, sending him to Tamriel is one way to potentially achieve that. Having said that, I would then expect the Psijics to be actively hunting him down and directing forces and circumstances against him quite actively in order to ensure that he is properly “crippled, humiliated, impoverished [or] imprisoned”. It’s a little strange that they didn’t.

This is particularly odd as the Order, in some places, claims that they are Tamriel’s defenders. I did have some more definite references to this, but they walked from my notes when my PC had a cleanup, and the only one I can find is in the Psijic Style Crafting Motif, which says:

Psijic bows are adorned with Mundial Globes that represent our order's equal commitment to the defense of all mortals that walk the surface of Nirn.

That indicates that the Psijics feel like they have a mission to protect Tamriel, which is potentially behind their actions that we see in the lore and the games. The Psijics have essentially been protecting Mundus through several of their actions, most obviously when they destroyed a fleet of Maomer en route to Summerset, so they have been inclined to more active in Tamriel’s politics from time to time, but have withdrawn from their involvement over time. Ritemaster Iachesis does withdraw at a very odd time, and we don’t entirely know why. The historical novel series 2920, The Last Year of the First Era puts words into Iachesis’ mouth, saying this:

"In a few years, the mists will move over Artaeum and we will be gone. We are counselors by nature, and there are too many counselors in Tamriel as it is. No, we will go, and return when the land needs us again, perhaps in another age."

This would put it that the Order has made a definite decision to withdraw because they don’t think they’re needed. Shortly after this, we have the rule of the Potentates, and the Interregnum, which led to a lot of chaos and death. I don’t think that Iachesis got this one right, personally, although the Psijics are sensitive to some things that others are not; Loremaster Celarus notes that the Psijics being present at all is in some ways a problem for the Order. When the player asks Loremaster Celarus why they’re needed, he says this:

Psijics like the Ritemaster and I exert tremendous stress on the Aurbic forces around us. Our very existence presents arcane risk.

It’s possible that the Order’s influence as a whole would present problems, although Celarus does note that the Order may have become “too reclusive”. I think this is possibly an error of judgement on the part of Iachesis, although it wouldn’t be just down to him alone.

The reason I say it’s not just down to him is because the Psijics are in theory guided by the Conclave of Eleven Forces, but we don’t really know enough about them to say precisely how it works. We know that Iachesis doesn’t really consider himself the “leader” of the Psijics, so I’d imagine there’s at least some degree of discussion or democracy in the Council’s decisionmaking. Quite how that works, though, we have little indication. It’s a body that has been in place for much of the Psijics’ history, as Iachesis was noted as being present in the first documented instance of the Order, in the first century of the First Era. As Iachesis is present at the time of ESO, that the Psijic Order has had organisational continuity for at least three and a half thousand years. That will create a lot of organisational inertia and conservatism, but also would mean that its values are deeply imbued, even when the membership does change, or a particular member wants to change something. I imagine there’s a lot of “the way things are done” exerting an influence on the Psijics, which would mean they’re one of the most directionally consistent bodies in the history of Tamriel.

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The Reachfolk’s Origins

On Tamriel

The Reachfolk are a culture of men that inhabit the area of Tamriel that sits on Skyrim’s western border and High Rock’s eastern border. They are called Bretons by pretty much everyone, but they have some unique history that separates them from the rest of High Rock. They’re as much Nord as they are anything else, because the Reach is claimed by Skyrim as its territory, but was retaken at various points by the Direnni elves, mixing their ancestry with that of mer as well as man, with some possible influence from orcish tribes in the area as well. The First Edition Pocket Guide to the Empire, in its ever merphobic fashion, puts it like this:

During the First Empire, it was incorporated as one of the Holds of Skyrim, and many Nords settled in its rolling hills and pleasant valleys. But they paid a terrible price during the Dissolution of Skyrim's Empire; the Aldmeri retook the Western Reach with a vengeance, slaughtering the Nord colonists to a man; precious little Nord blood flows in the veins of today's Reachmen. As a hedge against future incursions from Skyrim, the Aldmeri fashioned the Western Reach into an impregnable bastion. Thus, the Western Reach remained under Elven rule the longest of any part of High Rock, and the legacy of this dark sojourn can still be seen today.

This explains why the Reach was cut off from the rest of Skyrim to such a large degree, because they were under the heel of the Direnni for quite some time. This timeline puts it that the Direnni reasserted their rule during the War of Succession in the fourth century of the First Era, having been “descended originally from one of the earliest Atmoran tribes to settle Tamriel”, if the Pocket Guide is to be believed on that. I’m not 100% on that, because we know there are grumblings about the timeline of how men settled Tamriel; the Pocket Guide would assert that Skyrim was the first human kingdom from the biggest wave of settlement, which would put the Reachmen as a splinter group from some of Ysgramor’s people. However, if we follow the logic of Frontier, Conquest and Accommodation, it is possible that the Reachfolk were an earlier migration of Atmorans than Ysgramor and his Companions.

However, I think there’s a quite serious implication there; the Reachmen are universally considered Bretons, even by themselves, but if they were descended from the original Atmoran settlers, they are of a different type of stock to the Bretons, which are considered Nedic in origin. There is an argument to be made that the Atmorans are merely the biggest wave of Nedic migrants, but even if that’s true, the Reachfolk are distinct from the rest of the Bretons because they weren’t necessarily interbred with the Direnni at the same point as High Rock. We don’t know precisely when this happened, but if we take the First Edition Pocket Guide at its word, the manmeri were “beyond the Reach”, which suggests that the Reach was populated by purely mannish cultures at the point of the Reach’s incorporation into the First Nordic Empire. If that’s the case, then the Reachfolk only became “mixed blood” after the War of Succession, during the occupation, or re-occupation, by the Direnni. We have some sources that indicate that the Reach was occupied by men, others that it was part of the Direnni Hegemony. So it’s a little ambiguous as to what the “original state” of the Reachfolk was.

As a result, it feels a bit like the Reachfolk have never really progressed beyond the original Nedic state, if that’s actually what they started as. If I can put my foot in it for a while, it feels like the Reachfolk have never been able to rule themselves in anything but the most basic terms. They were first taken over as part of the Nordic Empire, then by the Direnni, and then by the Nords again. It almost feels like the narrative is portraying them as people who don’t want to be governed, but they’ve never really had the chance to do so.

In Game Design

This is something that’s moderately a problem in game design in general, I think, particularly from the archetypes that the Reachfolk are drawing from. I get the sense that, at least in their ESO incarnation, they’re based on Celtic archetypes. All the various “-ach” names, like “Durcorach”, “Maddanach”, “Caddach” in particular just shout out to me that this is the main inspiration for the Reachfolk, along with little nods here and there like the idea from The Reach Food Letters that “The knot shape resonates with the Reachfolk”, a callback to the celtic knot symbol.

The fractious nature of the Reachfolk (or the independent nature of the Reachfolk, pick your term) also means that they’re a useful device for the games, which we’ve seen play out a lot in The Elder Scrolls: Online. While some tribes can be used as allies, questgivers, whathaveyou for the player and their goals, others can be used as enemies. Just write about a reachfolk tribe that is flips a coin patriarchal, and rolls dice uses horker entrails as rolls dice wedding gifts and funeral rights, and you’ve got yourself a new Reachfolk tribe that can serve whatever narrative role is needed in the moment.

This has been taken to its logical conclusion in The Elder Scrolls: Online, because, as /u/TESBenefactor pointed out in an episode of the UESPodcast, most of the major events in The Elder Scrolls: Online, from Varen’s rebellion to Clivia Tharn’s taking over Elsweyr to the resurrection of the Grey Host have their roots in the Longhouse Emperors’ rule. Even those that don’t involve the Emperors, like the events of the Orsinium DLC, tend to use the Reachmen to some degree.

Their perennial “outsider” viewpoint makes them a useful tool for presenting an alternative view on particular matters, which I’m personally sure is a deliberate choice by the writers at Zenimax Online Studios. However, this does mean that the Reachfolk will almost always be involved with something else, and never really able to tell stories that are entirely “their own”, if I can put it that way. This is possibly an unfair characterisation for those at ZOS, but that’s the feeling that I get; the Reachfolk can only ever aspire to be deuteragonists, even if we’re not actively trying to kill or stop them.

Reachmen Society

To an extent the treatment of them by the games feels like how the Celts are treated in Roman sources: “barbaric” and outside the bounds of what more settled people call civilisation. Reachfolk are organised in tribes, scratching a living out of harsh ground.

Most of the written sources on the Reachfolk are at pains to point out that the Reachfolk are intentionally isolationist if not downright hostile to the notion of civilisation as most of Tamriel understands it. Even the figure of Caddach, who is presented as the “hope for the reach” in some ways, gets Markarth to be civilised by imposing a quasi-Imperial form of authority. To quote the Report on the Despot of Markarth:

To the Reachmen, he [Caddach] speaks of a free and independent Reach, holding true to Reach tradition and scorning the weak ways of outlanders. (His words, not mine.) But underneath that Reach-for-the-Reachfolk bluster, Caddach uses the trappings and systems of Imperial authority to transform Markarth into a functional state for the first time in the Reach's long and bloody history.

So according to this, even the most “successful” models of Reachfolk society are based around other systems. Or maybe that’s an incharitable reading. For all that the Report highlights that Caddach uses imperial systems, I don’t think that would work unless the other Reachfolk clans bought into it. On the Clans of the Reach states that:

To this day, Reachmen view the Longhouse Emperors as war-leaders they follow of their own free will. Kneeling to a king, even a Reachman king in Cyrodiil, is a thing that weaker peoples do.

Given that, the use of Cyrodilic systems is probably more what Caddach knows from his education, rather than a system that is attempting to impose institutions on the Reachfolk. I wouldn’t imagine that the Reachfolk would buy into that, in any case, because it would mean that the clan-chiefs would give up their power and independence, and the geography of the Reach itself almost conspires against a unified rule for the whole region. The book Provinces of Tamriel states that:

The rugged highland strongholds and isolated valley settlements have encouraged the fierce independence of the various local Breton clans, and this contentious tribal nature has never been completely integrated into a provincial or Imperial identity.

That isolation is part of what makes the Reach clans so independent, as exercising authority over it is not something that is easily done. This has resulted in the several distinct clans, that are independent of each other even if they share a similar cultural heritage. The book Politics of the Reach says this:

The great difficulty in dealing with the Reach is the fact that each individual clan sees itself as its own polity: free to raid, trade, make war, or agree to peace with anyone it chooses. To forge a lasting peace with the Reach, one would have to negotiate with dozens of different clans, some of whom hate each other so much that they would never agree to honor a peace their enemies choose to accept.

This makes the clan the core structure of their identity, and the clans nurture a variety of relations, including feuds on occasion. However, even the state of clans is fluid. We have this description of the clans from On the Clans of the Reach:

Clans fall somewhere between extended family and home village; some people in a clan are related to each other, but others adopt the clan name to mark their allegiance. New clans appear all the time, as bands of like-minded Reachfolk come together to settle new land, follow herds of game, or (in more chaotic times) take up raiding to plunder neighboring lands. As a result, clans can be surprisingly fluid, breaking up and reforming over time.

The Forsworn, and the Dissolution of Reachmen Identity

By the time of the Fourth Era, things are a little more condensed, it feels like. We encounter the Reachmen as the Foresworn, and according to the book The “Madmen” of the Reach. In that, a Reachman claims that “Go back and tell your Empire that we will have our own kingdom again”. The word “kingdom” here, rather than a looser term, suggests that the events of the Fourth Era have pushed the Reachfolk into being a distinct and singular identity. I’m not sure entirely when this happened, as the first Pocket Guide, written in the late Second Era, doesn’t reference much in the way of different tribes of Reachfolk, but the Pocket Guide is decidedly biased in that regard. However, that may just be the attitude of scholars throughout any time, as On the Clans of the Reach says this:

Until Durcorach the Black Drake led the warriors of the Reach against Cyrodiil, few scholars ever described the peoples of the Reach as anything other than howling barbarians. The rest of Tamriel views the Reachfolk as one great unruly horde, existing in constant anarchy—a state of ignorance whose cost the Black Drake's warriors made only too clear a generation ago.

It feels like this attitude prevails even among the Reachfolk themselves in the Fourth Era, as the Forsworn identify simply as Forsworn, while several residents of Markarth identify as Reachfolk, but without any real cultural markers that we can associate with them. Madmen of the Reach suggests that it is Tiber’s conquest that has slowly but surely eroded the Reach culture, to the point that the Forsworn are a small group that cling to whatever traditions they can. Without any real records, that’s difficult to confirm, and Arrianus Arius is sympathetic enough to the Reach’s cause that they may fudge their scholarship in that regard. However, it’s plausible, and without knowing what happens between the time of ESO and Tiber’s conquest, we can’t say for sure.

All that we can know is that by the time of the Fourth Era, the Forsworn held their own during a period of the Stormcrown Interregnum, in 4E 174-176. My guess is that they simply took Markarth and ran that as a city-state, but that’s just my own feeling.

There are also notes that Hagravens rose in prominence for the Forsworn, likely in a similar way to Red Eagle’s bargain. However, it’s not sure whether they really understand them. Herbane's Bestiary on Hagravens notes that they leave “small, crude trinkets and alters [sic] to these witches”, suggesting some attempt to appease them. We don’t know whether these are left knowingly, or at the Hagravens’ request, but it feels like at least a possibility that the Forsworn aren’t entirely certain of what the end relationship between these factions are, now that the traditional Reachfolk social structure is defunct.

Reachfolk Leadership

Precisely how the tribes were governed at both an intra- and inter-tribe level can vary widely. Internally, we’ve got the standard “clan-chief” idea attested in several places, although there are some clans noted in Clans of the Reach: A Guide that are matriarchal. From the text above, chiefs are things that just happen, and other forms of leadership carry both more and less weight all at once.

I think this is more because the Reachfolk put stock in what someone can do, rather than what they call themselves. On the Clans of the Reach puts it like this:

Some call themselves chieftains, speakers, elders, or kings, although most Reachmen think calling oneself ""king"" is a sort of putting on airs. Decades go by in the Reach with no clan-chiefs bothering to make the claim. But, if enough Reachfolk agree that one is strong enough to claim the title, then any clan-chief can be a king. In fact, there have been periods of history when multiple clan-chiefs called themselves kings at the same time; as the Reachmen say, anyone can be a king in the Reach, but no one is King of the Reach. Not even Durcorach claimed that title. To this day, Reachmen view the Longhouse Emperors as war-leaders they follow of their own free will. Kneeling to a king, even a Reachman king in Cyrodiil, is a thing that weaker peoples do.

That any larger group of the Reachfolk has to be a coalition of equals is something that again harks back to the popular picture of the Celts that the Reachfolk draw from. With Scottish Celts in particular, there are lots of rowdy chiefs that go to war together for shared reasons, and then break apart because of particular personal and political differences, often with no real difference between those two categories. Everything is based on the various alliances that can be pulled together and maintained by personal relationships. Which is what Caddach is doing at the time of The Elder Scrolls: Online is so interesting, because he’s the first to try and apply institutional governance to any portion of the Reach, although it’s still quite tied up with familial and personal ties in the way that it’s done. It’s a glimmer of a proto-state for the Reach, in the sense of having institutions that go beyond individuals. Or maybe that’s just Markarth, rather than the Reach as a whole.

The Place of Markarth

Markarth holds a particular place in the structure of the Reachfolk, which is reflected in their leadership. Markarth is the closest thing to a Reachfolk city, for much of Tamriel’s history. History of Markarth: A Story in Stone has it that the Reachfolk intermittently occupied the Dwemer ruins that form most of the city’s structure “within a few years”, with permanent residents in a little over 200 years after the Dwemer disappearance. It also mentions “the strongest clan-chief residing in the place” claiming a particular title. That implies that there could be multiple clans occupying Markarth, allowing it to almost function as a Reach in miniature. Politics of the Reach claims that:

it is best to think of the Reach as not one land, but two: Markarth and the wilds. Traditionally, whoever rules in Markarth exercises little power over the wilds, while the strong clans of the wilderness lack the strength or the inclination to govern the city of the Reach.

In this, Markarth seems to function like Orsinium does for the orcs; as the most centralised location of power, but also with some large cultural differences between the city and the wilder outlying areas. One that makes my ears prick up is that of “ard”, the title that the most powerful chief in Markarth claims. It means “king of the fort”, where, as we’ve established, the title of “King” is one that holds only nominal significance elsewhere. That this is a common term of address for anyone in Markarth, rather than just something one Reach chief has taken for themselves and then been discarded. It points to the idea that Markarth is distinct from everywhere else, as the above quote says.

There’s also some obvious mistrust between Markarth and the Reach. When the Longhouse Emperors ruled in Cyrodiil, the Report on the Despot of Markarth notes that:

To reassure the clan-chiefs that he did not intend to impose Imperial law in its entirety on the free Reachfolk, Moricar limited Caddach's writ to Markarth and the lands immediately surrounding the city. Thus the clan-chiefs were satisfied that Caddach was only to keep order in Markarth and otherwise leave the clans to rule themselves.

Thus, while Markarth is the most prominent place in the Reach, it can’t in any way be said to control it. Even though its place means its hard to take, successive rulers have been unable to project power from Markarth out into the rest of the Reach.

Markarth is also likely to be viewed with ambivalence by Reachmen with a more traditional view. According to History of Markarth: A Story in Stone, the place was captured by the Alessian Empress Hestra in 1E 1033, and remained an Alessian possession until the end of that empire:

Until the end of the Alessian Empire, Markarth remained under Imperial control (and, by all accounts, a dismal and dangerous posting for the Imperial soldiers assigned to its garrison). During this time, many of the Dwarven storerooms were converted into halls, houses, and workshops. The city took on the appearance we know today, although no human skill could improve upon the walls and watchtowers the Dwarves had constructed.

This would have resulted in a degree of transformation of Markarth, away from what the Reachfolk would have the place be. I can imagine that some would see that as a betrayal of their culture, to adopt things that one who conquered them put in place.

Hagravens

While clan matriarchs are definitely a thing, they seem distinct from the hagravens, but they may have some form of link. Clans of the Reach notes that, for the Stonetalon clan in particular:

women of the tribe seem to be rare. When they're seen, their women seem to be covered in heavy cloaks made of bird feathers, as if they've all taken ill.

This is later associated with being powerful spellcasters, which makes me think that the tribe has a particular association with the Hagravens, which the author of this text is misidentifying. Indeed, On the Clans of the Reach seems to identify two clans that are led by Hagravens, who are generally considered to be Reachfolk witches who traded their humanity for power. There are however hints that the Hagravens also function as entities independent from the Reachfolk tribal structure, most obviously in Legend of Red Eagle:

One night, under a cloud-choked sky, the men of the Red Eagle warmed themselves over damp fires of smoldering moss. A huddled, shambling figure came to them, cloaked in rags, face cowled. Though his men mocked and cast stones at the stranger, Faolan sensed something, and beckoned. The cowl was thrown back in the dim light, and she revealed herself to be one the ancient and venerable Hagravens. She offered power, for a price, and a pact was made.

The way that this text talks about the hagraven coming into Red Eagle’s tribe from “the outside” in a sense, makes me think that the Hagravens have some form of organisation outside of the tribes, although it should also be noted that the tribes also seem to have their own hagravens attached. They’re noted as forming “covens” of their own, which is perhaps where Red Eagle’s particular hagraven came from. This would then form a distinct structure apart from the general tribes, but we don’t get anything consistent on that.

Red Eagle

Red Eagle himself was pretty much the only Reachman to unite the whole of the Reach against a foe, although that may be later mythmaking. He lived during the First Era, and was driven out by the Empress Hestra as she claimed the Reach in what would eventually result in her halting at Bangkorai and admitting High Rock into the Empire.

Red Eagle, or Faolan, became a figure of the Reach resistance, and galvanised the Reachfolk clans to fight against the Alessians, pretty much constantly from what we can tell from the History of Markarth. He either fled or was cast out after Hestra’s initial conquest, and then returned, uniting the Reachfolk clans against Imperial rule. Or, at least, most of the clans. If you believe Legend of Red Eagle, he unified all of them, and there were only ten of them then, but there are bits about that book that feel anachronistic. For one thing, it calls the heads of the clans “kings”, so I’m a little cautious about how we treat that text. And so began a long campaign by Red Eagle against the Alessians, which ultimately failed. However, not before pledging himself to the Hagravens in a bargain that would become a central part of Reachfolk culture and mysticism ever after. To quote the Legend, because it gives a decent summary of the events:

One night, under a cloud-choked sky, the men of the Red Eagle warmed themselves over damp fires of smoldering moss. A huddled, shambling figure came to them, cloaked in rags, face cowled. Though his men mocked and cast stones at the stranger, Faolan sensed something, and beckoned. The cowl was thrown back in the dim light, and she revealed herself to be one the ancient and venerable Hagravens. She offered power, for a price, and a pact was made.

Thus was brokered to the witch: his heart, his will, his humanity. From that day forth, his was a spirit of vengeance, pitiless and beyond remorse. The rebels grew in strength and numbers, and none could stand against them. Faolan's eyes burned coldly in those days, black opals reflecting a mind not entirely his own. Two years passed, and the foreigners were all but driven from the Reach.

This wouldn’t last, however, because Hestra returned, killing Red Eagle and putting an end to his movement. Red Eagle being a unifier, and the fact that he ultimately failed, makes me think again to Celtic history, this time Vercingetorix of the Gauls. However, beyond those two features there isn’t really too much that links the two. Vercingetorix was taken prisoner by Julius Caesar, while Red Eagle had something of a different legacy for the Reachfolk.

We have an account that I do actually trust to be accurate in the particulars to a degree, the Translated Works of Tosmorn. While there is some in-universe controversy about how authentic these are, the end has some interesting implications, when the Hagraven returns following Red Eagle’s death:

The Hag comes now to claim her due

Her crow, in vanguard, laughs to see the witch-men

Their ash and resin useless

She takes the staff of yew and brings it down

Upon Faolan's breast

The ichor within bursts forth, a black blood

And she takes the fruit of her desire

Seeded in Faolan's chest

A hundred hands draw flint, nock arrows

All lose heart, the Hag's laugh festers at the soul

As death surrounds her

A thousand crows take flight beneath her cowl

And she is gone

We also have this from Red Eagle’s Song, which says it explicitly:

At last he traded his Eagle's heart

To the ravens who covet our power

In his breast they planted the briar seed

That grows from the corpse's flower

From the reaction of the onlookers in the Tosmorn poem, this wasn’t an established part of Reachfolk practice at the time. So, as much as there are attempts during the Interregnum to bring him back using his actual descendants, I think the Briar-Hearts as his figurative legacy is also important.

His line, and the events in The Elder Scrolls: Online, are important because there are legends of Red Eagle’s return. Exactly what that might mean could take on a variety of different meanings, which is why the coven is trying to tap Bjora to lead them, being returned via his descendents, rather than his sword, which is what the Legend of Red Eagle promises. I guess it depends on whatever oral tradition a given Reachfolk tribe has passed down.Reachfolk Belief

Another area that the Reachfolk vary on quite a bit is faith. There’s a lot of talk about them referring the “old gods”, and that these are thinly-veiled references to the Daedra, and are outright called Daedra in other places. However, the Reachfolk’s take on the Daedra offer some interesting perspectives of the world, and they fit into a broader spiritual worldview. They are revered alongside the ancestors of the tribe, who are also there to protect the clans that they came from.

Great Spirits of the Reach puts it like this:

The Reachfolk worship many spirits, both great and small. In truth, there are as many faiths as there are clans in the Reach. Some clans might worship a sacred elk or the spirit of a mountain spring. Others might sacrifice goats to ghosts of ancient heroes. There are some spirits, however, that transcend clan boundaries—those we in the rest of Tamriel recognize as the Daedric Princes.

There are several distinct takes that Great Spirits of the Reach puts on these Daedra, which has some interesting implications for the Aedra/Daedra relationship, but I want to first consider how the Reachfolk see the rest of their interaction with spirits and the like.

Spirits

In common with most of Tamriel, Reachfolk revere their ancestors to some degree. However, they also see the spirits as something inherent in the land, and I’ve seen /u/Jonny_Anonymous call them “animist” in their beliefs. I think this is a reasonable summary for how they see the world, insofar as they see general spirits of place and time affecting their lives. A Reach Travel Guide, written by a Reachman, puts it like this:

First, you would do well to visit the spirit shrines and make offerings to those whose lands you now tread upon, for you will find no mercy from the Divines in the Reach. Before that, you will need to beg the forgiveness of its peoples you have tread upon, lest they cast you down like those who came before. If you appease the clans and spirits to gain fair passage, then you may yet survive this journey.

The clans and spirits are considered together here, because they both need to be reckoned with if you are to survive in the Reach. This isn’t necessarily worship, as we understand the term, but more a bargain between people and the world. That bargain then becomes the condition upon which civility between anything, whether person to person, or god to person, or person to god, rests. Violate that agreement, and then all bets are off. The book Werewolves: Long-Suffering Guardians puts it like this:

Many Alessians, Northmen, and Pigfolk have come to the Reach bearing gifts. You yourself bring worthless coin and writ books as tokens of friendship. But these are all lies and tricks. Sons and daughters of the Reach know that the 'gifts' of outsiders all carry demands. Demands for knowledge, or land, or help against one enemy or another. In the world of beasts and spirits—the true world—there are no gifts. Only trades.

This not only informs how Reachfolk think about outsiders, but that the spirits are expected to give something for something if treated right. The spirits are often considered mercurial, or at least hard to satisfy; A Year Among the Eagleseer Clan illustrates this really well when the death of a chief is blamed on him becoming too soft because he welcomed an outsider in. He therefore acted improperly towards the local gods. Living on the Karth River paints a similar picture of the Karth River; that respect of the river itself is required in order to have a life upon it:

But as with much of the Reach, the Karth River provides for its people. It can be cruel one moment, then as loving as a mother the next. Those who rely on it for their survival live to see another day—if the river allows it. Those who live to old age on its banks, like my father, know that respect is key. The river may bestow plenty of fish to one and drown another, with seemingly little to distinguish between them. But those that have grown up on the Karth know better. We know the river demands respect, or at the very least, consideration.

This also highlights how the Reachfolk consider themselves beholden to the spirits of the land, as unforgiving as they may be. Part of the reason they’re so wary of outsiders is because outsiders do not appreciate the land, and so may anger the spirits that dwell within.

Daedra

As well as the spirits of the land, the Reachfolk also revere the Daedra. Or, at least, some of the Daedra. Great Spirits of the Reach names Hircine, Namira, Peryite and Lorkhan as their primary spirits, although Malacath and the Reach considers that Malacath is also of some importance. All of these speak to the Reachfolk’s expectations of what they can get out of the land - that they will be greeted with wildness, decay, and mortality.

I think it’s kind of telling that the Reachfolk elevate those Daedra in ways that almost mirror the Aedra, or at least subsume different Daedra’s purviews into their own. We’re going to engage in a little bit of direct comparative theology here, if you’ll indulge me, because Reachfolk’s views are a grab-bag of things that are similar to those you’ll find in other cultures. Also bear in mind that interpretations likely vary from tribe to tribe, and so these will not be the be-all-and-end-all.

Hircine is a multi-faceted deity according to Aspects of Lord Hircine, with five different aspects, that of hunter, bear, manbeast, stag and fox. This is fitting for his role as a transformative deity, and vaguely hints at the idea of the limit of the world in the 36 Lessons, which is also the cycle of life and death as represented in the Hunt. However, the one that I find most intriguing is in Great Spirits of the Reach, which calls Hircine “the avatar of the fierce and terrifying ‘now.’”, which is a direct mirror to Y’ffre as “the spirit of the ‘now’” in Varieties of Faith. I don’t know that the Reachfolk have a similar sense of Hircine as a deity that orders everything, but the idea of the predator-prey rhythm feels similar to that, at least.

Namira is seen as “the avatar of all primal dualisms”, with conflict at the core. This speaks to decay as a process that produces life, but it also sounds to me like the Khajiiti view of Namiira as “the ancient darkness”. In positioning Namira as a primal deity of conflict, the Reachfolk position her as a deity that embodies the enantiomorph, a duality and conflict that shapes almost everything in the Aurbis. So it’s possible that the Reachfolk understand the idea of the enantiomorph more than most cultures on Tamriel. But if so, they certainly haven’t written or spoken about it in those terms.

We also have this tidbit on the passage about Lorkh:

According to Reach myths, Lorkh convinced the Spirit Queen, Namira, to grant him a place in the infinite void where he could create a realm for wayward spirits. Rather than a vibrant paradise, Lorkh created a hard and painful place—a realm that taught through suffering. While some resent Lorkh's cruelty, most praise his wisdom. According to the Reachfolk, those who suffer most know best. Hardship is a means to wisdom and glory, and Lorkh provided hardship in ample supply.

(emphasis added)

We’ll get to Lorkh’s provision of suffering in a bit, but I want to draw attention to Namira’s role here. She makes the space for creation to happen, a role usually assigned to Kynareth in most Aedric myths. That the Mundus happens in the primal darkness in Khajiiti myths also highlights that Namira has a much greater role in the ordering of the cosmos than most faiths have given her credit for.

Peryite is the force of balance for the Reachfolk, as Great Spirits of the Reach tells it; instead of ordering Oblivion, Peryite orders Mundus as well for them. If this is true, then it has implications for how much the Daedra interfere with the mortal realm. Peryite being a dragon also feels like he’s mirroring the order of time provided by Akatosh, which is of less importance for the Reachmen. Instead of worrying too much about measurement, they’re more fussed about seasons, who is beating who and other order-related stuff, with the ultimate idea that they should return to balance, which is under Peryite’s purview, as well as “survival of the fittest” being important as decay and disease get rid of the weak and lame. This is subsuming bits of Akatosh, but also Zenithar as a cosmic order deity, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they also view Peryite as a seasonal deity as well, treading on Arkay’s toes, but I have no evidence for that.

Lorkh is, as the name suggests, Lorkhan’s iteration of the Reachfolk. I think they’re unique among mannish races for linking him to his merish incarnation. This is another indicator that they’re not just messed up Bretons, because they don’t associate Lorkh with Sheor’s attributes. If anything, because Lorkh creates the world as a “harsh and painful place”, they share more with the Chimeri/Dunmeri view of creation than anything else; a painful place of trial, that bestows lessons on people to make them better. Quite when the Reachfolk would have got hold of Dunmeri theology to get this perspective on Lorkh is unclear, but it maps really closely to that. It also links to the animistic side of Reachfolk belief; it’s only fitting that the one who created a landscape that is so harsh is himself harsh in turn. I’d honestly be inclined to say that the landscape’s hardships came first, and where then projected onto Lorkh, but I have nothing really to support that.

I know I've treated a few things with rather short-shrift in this (the Longhouse Emperors and some elements of Reachfolk myth didn't quite get into this), but I'll try to touch on them in a future cast. The Longhouse Emperors are probably worth a minisode of their own, which I'll get to.

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Today on Written in Uncertainty we’re looking at a being and a god who is a fusion of people and place, the embodiment of a bond that defines a culture. Today we’re asking, what is the Wilderking?

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Rather than diving straight in to Altmer religion, I want to start off by looking at merish religion more broadly. I’m defining “Aldmeri religion” a little loosely, but we’ll mostly be looking at the religious traditions that emerged from Summerset. I guess you could say that we’re therefore looking at “Altmeri” religion more than we are anything else, but there are enough elements of the progenitors of Altmeri religion that I want to stick with the “Aldmeri” monniker.

Ancestor Worship: The Core of All Aldmeri Religions

I suppose I’d better start with why I’ve gone quite so broad in my definition. It’s because most merish religions treat themselves as being descended from the gods, while, at least according to the stories we hear from the Monomyth, men consider that they’ve been created by them. I personally think that’s a little off, given the account of the Old and Wandering Ehlnofey we get in the Anuad, which both seem to be descended in some way from the Et’ada. But I don’t want to get too much into the weeds of that here. I talk about that a bit more in my podcast on the difference between men and mer.

The main point of all this is that the Aldmer, in various ways, consider themselves to be descendents of the gods, meaning that ancestor worship is the default setting for most Aldmeri religion. We do have some different offshoots of this; we have the Chimeri religion that worships the Daedra as ancestors, while the Bosmer worship Y’ffre, who the Altmer equate with Jephre, who may or may not have sung the mer into being according to The Ooze: A Fable. Then the Psijics, who we’ll get to in a bit more detail later.

Ancestor Worship & Aldmeris

This stems from the religion practiced on Aldmeris. We don’t have any primary texts on what was going on on Aldmeris, so we have to go from some other sources. The most obvious example of this is, as is often the case, in the Pocket Guide to the Empire, in this case the third edition:

Early Aldmer society was agricultural and politically egalitarian. A system of ancestor worship had been exported whole from Aldmeris, and it brought with it a communal spirit that served the early settlers of Summerset well. When the Aldmer came together as a people to create the Crystal Tower, it was not a monument to any king or god, but rather to the spirit of the elven people, living and dead.

This is a freewheeling, worship all of those that have gone before. The point about the Crystal Tower is interesting, because it indicates that the Crystal Tower is essentially a religious monument to ancestor worship. It also sounds quite generic; there are no specifics here, no particular ancestors, but all Aldmer. I would caution that this is the Pocket Guide, and so is written from a pro-Cyrodilic perspective, and is removed from those who have a stake in the Crystal Tower.

However, we have this from the book The Old Ways, written by a Psijic. In particular it says this:

What, after all, is the origin of these spiritual forces that move the invisible strings of Mundus? Any neophyte of Artaeum knows that the spirits are our ancestors, and that, while living, they too were bewildered by the spirits of their ancestors, and so on to the original Acharyai. The daedra and gods the common people turn to are no more than the spirits of superior men and women whose power and passion granted them great influence in the phantom world.

This is similar to the position of the Pocket Guide, but with the difference that the ancestors are removed from the first order of things worshipped, but instead talks of “spiritual forces that move the invisible strings of Mundus”. This isn’t entirely ancestor worship in the polytheistic sense, but animistic. That is, the world is imbued with spiritual presences that make it “go”. There is a possible distinction between these and the “gods”, but, as per the Monomyth, we know that the Psijics have a history of making their beliefs palatable to others. So it’s possible that the text is making it closer to the presumed reader’s expectations, rather than the Psijics having a definite “gods” class distinct from other sacred things.

This distinction is portrayed in the Pocket Guide as the evolution of social trends:

The religion of the people also changed because of this change in society: no longer did the Aldmer worship their own ancestors, but the ancestors of their “betters.” Auriel, Trinimac, Syrabane, and Phynaster are among the many ancestor spirits who became Gods. A group of elders rebelled against this trend, calling themselves the Psijics, the keepers of the Old Ways of Aldmeris.

This makes the Psijics part of a wider religious schism from Summerset, which I think includes the Chimer. We don’t know when the Psijics split from Summerset, and Vehk’s Teaching claims that Veloth wasn’t part of the Psijics, but they feel like both factions are part of the same reaction against the stratification and reform of the religion of Aldmeris. I’ve also argued before that the Direnni heading to High Rock forms part of the same movement, but I think there’s less evidence for that. It doesn’t help that there’s no concrete dates for any of these exoduses; the Velothi is the only one we have a date for, in the Middle Merethic Era. It feels to me like these groups are reacting to the same thing, but that’s just me.

The Altmer who followed the reforms defaulted to worship of what would become the pantheon of the Aedra. At this point it didn’t have all of the Altmeri deities, like Syrabane and Phynaster, who ascended at various points in recorded history. If they ascended at all.

Ancestor Worship, Ascension & Preservation

The Altmer have several deities who are ascended mortals. Phynaster, Syrabane and Auri-El at the least, maybe Xarxes as well, all began as mortals but became gods because of their actions. Although of these, we don’t have a whole heap of evidence that they actually achieved divinity of any sort, rather than just being revered as a god. Although whether that makes an actual difference is an open question.

Regardless of the actual method, there are several elves who have supposedly re-ascended. This is taken as something of a natural consequence, although we don’t have much evidence for that. The most direct thing we have is a quote from a Khajiit explaining how Summerset society works in Tips for a Khajiit in Summerset:

The Thrassian Plague seems but a faded scar next to the still bleeding cut of the Knahaten Flu, but it holds a deep importance to the mer of Summerset. Bezumi thinks this has much to do with the involvement of their god-ancestor Syrabane, also known as the Warlock’s God. A mage so powerful that he ascended into godhood, well, is that not the High Elf ideal?

This sort of thing is where people get the idea that the Altmer are looking to escape Mundus, and get back to being gods themselves.

That does seem to be the idea from quotes like this, but that’s not the whole story, I don’t think. The above quote mentions that Syrabane preserves the memory of the Thrassian Plague, and that’s possibly what the role of these hero-gods play in Altmeri society. With the shift to the “ancestors of their betters”, Altmer strive to preserve worthwhile deeds and acts. To become something worth preserving is possibly the goal here, to be part of the great story and lineage of the Ehlnofey, which is also something close to godhood, because the Ehlnofey were close to godhood.

I think this also explains why the High Elves revere Xarxes; it is his role to be Auri-El’s scribe, and record history. He becomes the gatekeeper of lineages to the Altmer, and, perhaps, an ultimate judge of who is worthy to be accounted an Ancestor. That makes him a door to divinity that must be respected and crossed. That’s just the sense I get, anyway.

The Altmeri concern for preservation does extend to Mundus, despite what many fans think about the Thalmor destroying the world in particular. I’ve previously questioned why the Altmer don’t have ascetic strains of their faith, and I think I’ve since found an answer. The book Corruption of the Blood says this:

For millennia we Altmer have safeguarded a divine legacy. We are all that remains of Old Ehlnofey. We were entrusted by the et’Ada to preserve what they sacrificed so much to create.

For the Altmer, their faith encourages a preservation of what was by following the old ways and traditions, rather than by innovating and being all new and different. There’s a sort of doublethink going on here, because while, to quote the Monomyth, they see creation as “a painful separation from the divine”, once creation is here as a relic of the divine, it is to be protected.

There’s also the sense that Old Ehlnofey is the thing that needs preserving. The past is sacred, while the future is inherently profane. This makes the repetition of what came before a sacred act, and perhaps one that has eschatological significance. By repeating the acts that emulate those that created Mundus, they help preserve it. Their acts of preservation, which run from their veneration of the first ancestors through to ensuring that craftsmership is to the required standard, have a religious and existential significance.

The Altmer have refined this down into a particular way of being, if a particular NPC from ESO is to be believed. The Path of Alaxon is described like this by Olnewil:

Alaxon is the state of perfection that every High Elf strives for. The Path to Alaxon represents the approach we take to achieve that state.

That she can achieve this by being an artist, rather than achieving some form of more mystical enlightenment, speaks again to the Altmer desire to preserve Mundus as an instrument created by the Aedra. She also says that it “requires constant vigilance”, suggesting it also has some sort of mental component. There’s no mention of ascending to godhood in the conversation, but as she’s distracted from everything they were doing, she probably wouldn’t be in a position to give a full breakdown of the path. As it’s quite as common as it is, as she talks about “every high elf” striving for it (yes, I know not all will, but enough must in order to make that sort of claim), I don’t expect it to actually “work” that often. There’s only a handful of Altmer who have ascended, out of the multitude that would be on the Path of Alaxon.

Unless ascension isn’t the point. To keep on the preservation stream, the cultural markers for the Altmer that everyone hates, the tight hierarchy and “way of doing things” like the “Altmer rules of dueling” or the “Proper Conflict” mentioned in Common Arms of Valenwood, are all about being in a particular way, something close to what the Ehlnofey were as a culture. To quote from Corruption of the Blood again:

To stray, even slightly, from the ways of our ancestors will have dire consequences

This feels like the notion that MK has said on Reddit that “wars [in the Dawn Era] were ideologies given skin”. The divergent ideologies of the various strains of the Aldmer are a thing of terror to these forms of the Altmer. They have a lot of object lessons that deviation from their path results in transformation. Every other kind of mer out there, with the possible exception of the Maomer, was the result of an ideological change or some form of “corruption” from the Aldmeri/Altmeri ideal.

Combine this with the long lifespan of the Altmer, the constant reminders of the past that are a part of their culture, and you can almost understand the Altmer need to keep themselves closed off from the rest of Tamriel and becoming isolationist. If coming into contact with other races has always brought about pain and suffering, why would this time be any different? Such contact isn’t direct contamination, but a contamination of thought. If you enjoy the company of Men, what if you adopt their ways? The remnant of the Ehlnofey that was in you passes away, and some of the splendour of the past, a little bit of that godhood, slips away into nothingness.

This means that the Altmer likely think that the past contains all the answers. So I now want to look at what happens when it’s clear that the past and tradition don’t hold all the answers.

High Elves in Daedric Despair

I want to thank /u/HappyB3 for this, as we go into the area that’s covered by his magnificent essay, “Does the Thalmor really want to unmake the world?” — On the pervasiveness of world-ending and Daedric cults in Altmeri culture: their characterization in primary and secondary sources and on-going influences over the depiction of elven factions. We’re getting into Altmeri Daedra worship. I’d suggest you give that a read, whenever you can.

We have several examples of the Altmer taking up Daedra worship, or at least Daedric pacts, in order to achieve their goals. Happy has pointed out that these goals all seem to involve remaking the world or the self, none of them are destructive as an end. It’s not “be rewarded for Daedric service and get to rule in hell”, so to speak. At least for the most part. Talking to Earl Leythen in the ESO: Summerset expansion about why he joined the Court of Bedlam, the cult supporting the plot between Nocturnal, Mephala and Clavicus Vile, he says this:

“The Court offered me a purpose after my life lost its meaning. Our Princes promised to remake the world, turn it into a better place. A paradise. And they were going to elevate the Altmer back to their status as gods.Suffering would come to an end.“Player Character: Isn’t that what Nocturnal still wants to do?“Not in the least. Remaking the world to eliminate death and disease is one thing. Destroying everything to turn yourself into a being of infinite power—well, that’s something else entirely..”

(emphasis added)

And similarly, Veya who became Earl Tundilwen gives this account of why she joined the Court in her Private Thoughts journal:

Mother has given me a new name. A new goal. Blood will be spilled. Lives will be lost. But in the end, the world itself shall change. No more pain. No more loss.No longer am I daughter of House Redoran. Now I am a daughter of Nocturnal.My name is Tundilwen, and I will burn the world so that a better one may rise from the ashes.

There are several more examples of this, Mankar Camoran in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion being the most obvious. These all stand in contrast to the standard Altmeri view that preservation and cultivation is what’s needed, not revolution and destruction.

Heretical Modernity

However, that older belief is contingent on things going “as it should”, of the world not going too awry. When the world stops working how the Altmer think it should, they start to try and remake the world to work the way they think it should, by violence and disregard of the older ways. This is spelled out in the Third Edition Pocket Guide to the Empire:

For thousands of years, the Altmer have implicitly believed in their superiority to all other races and cultures in Tamriel. For much of this time, they may have been right. But after the incorporation of Summerset into the Empire, doubts began to creep in. With the insularity of the Summerset decisively broken, many Altmer, particularly the young (which among the High Elves is a fairly loose term), began to take a more critical view of the rigid hierarchy of Altmer society and its strict cultural xenophobia. While there had always been discontent on the fringes of Altmer society, which was traditionally resolved by exile of the malcontents, for the first time a significant element of Altmer began to agitate for social change.

There’s a paragraph about the benefits of this approach, and then this:

A darker side of this movement, however, is exhibited by a shadowy group who call themselves the Beautiful. Originally a salon for artists with the reasonable philosophy that Summerset must let go of its past in order to move forward, the Beautiful became a revolutionary gang dedicated to the destruction of the greatest monuments of Altmer civilizations. The Crystal Tower was naturally an early target, and fortunately attempts against it have failed, but many other great, ancient sculptures and emblems of the past have been vandalized. Lately, the Beautiful have turned their attention to living symbols of the Isle, the royalty of Summerset. The particularly gruesome murder of the daughter of the King of Shimmerene has horrified and outraged the public.

The Beautiful are acting in the same way as the Daedric cultists here; they have their promised, expected heritage denied them, and so their impulse is to turn on the world that created them and tear it down. That the Beautiful are often thought by fans to be the beginnings of the Fourth Era Thalmor should give you a rough idea of where this leads.

This, in my opinion, is where the Altmeri thought turns almost fascist, in the same way that violent Islamism is fascist. What do I mean by that? In The Nature of Fascism, Roger Griffin defines fascism as “Palingenetic ultranationalism”, that is a form of nationalism that relies on palingenesis, or rebirth. Fascist movements, most violent Islamist movements, and the Fourth Era Thalmor, all rely on appealing to a return to tradition that never really existed, and a reassertion of a violent social and political identity in the face of a world that doesn’t work the way they think it should. Altmer should be the top of the socio-political food chain, but they were conquered by Tiber Septim. This means that the Altmer need to be even more Altmeri, but in a different way to before. They need to stand united, but differently to before. The preservation becomes not about the preservation of tradition, but the preservation of what supremacy and power they have, wielding cultural signifiers in order to justify it. In this way, the Thalmor justified suppression of dissent. At least, that’s how Rising Threat puts it, that the Thalmor manipulated public opinion to allow them to change Altmer society to how they wanted it to be.

This is only really possible because Altmeri beliefs did not have the tools to think that they could have been wrong. Most other cultures on Tamriel have a “coping mechanism” of sorts, that allows them to adjust their behaviour when the going gets tough. The Chimer/Dunmer and the Nords just expect life to be hard and get in with whatever the world throws at them, with the Nords particularly enjoying the fight. The Redguards know they have to walk in different ways to reach their ideal. The Khajiit tell themselves that Nirni is arrayed against them and will be harsh. The Bsomer have the Spinners to tell whatever stories they need in order to carry on being the Bosmer in any given situation. The Bretons have Sheor’s machinations behind things. The Cyrodiils have any number of different cults, and I’d imagine can change focus from one Divine to another as they need to. It’s only the Altmer that have their social expectations so baked into their faith that when the world doesn’t line up for them, they break.

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