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ansu-gurleht · 5 years

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let's talk metaphysics, friends and countrymen. i should preface this by saying it's my interpretation of the lore, and that im borrowing a good bit from other theories before me. but my goal here is to make what i believe as clear as possible.

first, to set the scene, allow me to present an appropriate frankensteined quote:

"In heaven as it is on earth ... the whole of the law is do as thou wilt." - Matthew 6:10 and Aleister Crowley

and finally, before the readmore, here's the essence of what i believe about the metaphysics of the elder scrolls universe:

in this universe, the driving forces aren't any laws of physics, but the desires, wants, wills, hopes, dreams, and ideas of its inhabitants, from ancient deities to mortal men and mer to the meekest beasts to the world itself. everything is made from what people want, think, and believe, both individually and collaboratively.

that said, i do NOT consider the world to be the "dream" of some sort of "godhead" or "amaranth." it is all very real, and the fact that its existence is determined by desires is real, too. i don't adhere to the meta theory that the setting's core is inherently fictional - in our world, it is, but in theirs, it is very real.

with that out of the way, it's important i establish one of the most important bits of terminology i'll be using here: AE. AE is what you might could call a "soul" or similar unique essence that every being possesses, but it's more than that, really. it's the desire to exist as a separate, unique being, as well as the desires that being possesses.

AE is also its own power source in this universe. in our world, we can want something to be done, or imagine it, but that doesn't make it so without putting in effort to make it reality. in the world of the elder scrolls, the simple desire for something to happen greatly influences its possibility of happening. the stronger the AE, the more power it holds, meaning it has greater sway over the outcomes of reality.

the way that the universe (what we would call the aurbis) began was that the First AE (capitalized to distinguish it from other AEs, as it’ll be important later) willed itself to exist. that’s a very primal sort of AE. you see, back then, there wasn’t anything except the Void, which also wasn’t anything, either. it’s a bit confusing, but think of it as the concept of “nothingness” but completely stripped of all of our ideas and connotations. true “nothingness” in this way is actually quite a bit different from, say, empty space.

if you know anything about quantum physics, i might have another way to describe it. (if you know a lot about quantum physics, i’m sorry that i’m probably wrong.) the absolutely most basic, smallest level of the universe (our real life one, that is) is these things we call “strings” that “float” in a quantum “foam.” those strings are sort of like how you always see waveforms drawn in physics classes or whatever, except instead of a drawing, they’re actually millions of times smaller than atoms, and they make up the fabric of our reality.

the particular wavelength and form of a quantum string determines what exists “at that point” in space. so some strings say, “this is a quark,” or “this is a neutrino,” or “this is just a photon with a red wavelength.” what i’ve called “quantum foam” is basically the somewhat chaotic nature of these strings at that smallest level. some strings just do whatever and don’t care. they change back and forth from zero energy to being an electron and back again, but the overall difference is basically cancelled out, so you can’t really say anything was ever there at all.

that is what the Void in the elder scrolls is like. it’s an infinitely empty space carrying unfulfilled potential for existence. things could happen there, and sometimes do, but just as often things don’t, and the things that happen are so minimal, or get cancelled out by their opposite thing, that it doesn’t really mean anything to say something happened at all.

so what’s the First AE, the thing that created the Aurbis? the first thing that was ever “desired” in that universe was for something to exist separately from the Void. due to the chaotic nature of the void, this sorta necessitated that the Aurbis would be a bit less chaotic. it was absolutely chaotic at the beginning, with a lot going on all at once. but you could actually ascribe meaning to things, even though it may be convoluted or difficult to understand.

to speak in terms of in-universe sources, you could call the First AE “Anu” and the Void “Padomay.” however, i’m not going to be mentioning them much, especially not as sentient entities of their own. they’re really just the purest cosmic essence of order and chaos, meaning and meaninglessness. kinda.

but, essentially, the First AE is something like, “i wanna be Anu and you can be Padomay.” so a zero becomes ... either one or two, depending on how you look at it. do you count padomay? or is padomay still a zero?

i’d say both! as soon as anu is “born,” padomay is also born. you could say anu = 1, and padomay = 0, but padomay does NOT equal the same 0 as it did before. before, padomay was that “primordial” zero, the one without any meaning. but by anu Willing itself to exist, it gives padomay the meaning Not-Anu. before, padomay had no defining characteristics. now, its single defining characteristic is that it is separate from anu.

anyways, the aurbis, in its own weird way, is also infinite like padomay/the Void is. it’s a lesser infinity, but comparing the sizes of infinities is confusing, so i’m not going to dwell on that. suffice to say, it’s also infinite. and it’s packed full of something similar to what the Void is filled of, but also very different. it’s got stuff happening, but a lot of stuff doesn’t immediately get undone. what it’s filled with is what we call “creatia,” which is the Stuff that everything is made of. an important distinction: it’s Stuff, not Things. it’s got this limitless potential to Exist as Things, but it has to be MADE into particular Things. otherwise, it’s just random stuff. kinda like legos that haven’t been built into anything, except the legos can take on basically any shape they want.

keyword: want. there’s room in this aurbis for other AEs, too! the first one after the First AE is basically, “well, i wanna be separate from anu too” and becomes separate, but in a .... very particular way. as i said, the aurbis is infinite, which means that there’s endless possibilities in the way AEs can manifest. it’s sort of like, anu wanted to exist just so something existed. all the AEs that come after want to exist for a reason, and each one has a different reason.

anyways, after that second AE, a bunch more start cropping up really fast, and a lot of them are VERY different from each other. think of it like this: if the aurbis is infinite, and you randomly pick out a chunk (represented as a number), you could get like, a 41. or a 291196283494. or a 6290. you can get a bunch of wildly different Things. an infinite bunch, actually.

unfortunately, because just about all of these brand new Things that exist are very different, their AEs don’t get along. one will say “i want to exist as a banana,” and another will say, “well, i want to exist as a fast-breeding animal that only eats bananas, and is really, really good at it.” (that’s a probably bad, and admittedly weird/random example, but hopefully it illustrates my point.)

let’s look at this from a real-world astrophysics lens again: at the beginning of our universe, the first things that existed were either matter or antimatter. except they really didn’t get along, and if they met each other they’d get into a fight and both die. explosively. and also, the universe wasn’t too big, so there wasn’t a lot of room, and they ran into each other a lot.

you could say the tes universe is similar. a lot of Things existing that don’t get along, and fighting all the time. except if one wins, it either absorbs the other into itself, or the loser just ... stops existing. there’s an infinite amount of aurbis to go around, for sure. but this particular period of its “history” went on (and might still be going on) for an infinite amount of time. Things and Ideas and Stories and People and Places all fighting over who gets to be Real, or really, who gets to be the Realest. it all depends on which one has the strongest AE, which one wants it the most. and all these Things are developing as they fight and absorb each other, becoming even more unique, becoming even more sure in their AE.

so what we end up with, in tes, is basically a bunch of these spirits we call the et’ada. it’s just a loose conglomerate of entities that were basically the strongest of the bunch.

one of the most well known of them, lorkhan, had a really strong AE. but he didn’t really feel like fighting anybody, or hanging out with the cool kids, so to speak. he’d been around for a long time, and felt kinda disenchanted with the whole thing. so he just kinda wandered around the aurbis, looking for stuff to do, or see, or talk to, hoping to try and justify his existence. because his AE to exist was strong, but he wasn’t sure why.

at some point he somehow finds the “edge” of the aurbis, the boundary between anu and padomay. and he walks out into the Void, and then turns around. and he sees the 1, the whole, completely separate from everything else and containing multitudes within itself. and lorkhan realizes .... something. something utterly transcendental, as i imagine what looking at all of existence would do to you. and with that realization, he also realized why he wanted to exist.

he went to his friends, the other spirits, and said, “good news, guys! i found something really cool and special, and i want to show you all!”

and they said, “ok, uh, what’s your name again?” a lot of them had heard about him, but didn’t know too much about him.

“oh, lorkhan,” he said. they asked him where it was, and he said, “oh, we have to go out into the Void to see it.”

some folks didn’t even know what he was on about. what’s the Void anyway? but there was one guy who was old enough to know. he was some cranky old dragon guy obsessed with clocks. and he said, “uh, hell no, are you crazy? if you go out into the void you’ll stop existing and probably die.”

dragon dude, aka akatosh, was pretty popular, almost the most popular probably, so everyone was immediately on his side. but lorkhan said, “well, i went out and i was fine! trust me guys it’s REALLY cool.”

and akatosh said, “it’s probably because you’re a freak, some kinda mutant that barely exists anyway.” and lorkhan didn’t really know how to respond, and everybody left him, whispering to each other about how he was a freak.

so lorkhan thought about this. he thought long and hard. how do i make them believe me? how do i make them understand that they need to see this? he talked with some of his other, kinda outcasty friends. eventually, he came up with an idea. he went to who was probably his most popular friend and told her about his plan. her name was kynareth, and he wanted to know if she would vouch for him if he presented this to some of the other big guys in town. she was absolutely delighted and promised that she would kick up a hurricane if she had to to get his plan going.

so everybody gets together and lorkhan tells them his plan. since everybody was being chicken and wouldn’t go see it themselves, lorkhan figured the next best thing was to make a miniature model of what he wanted to show them. the best way he figured to do this was by making a world.

now, the aurbis wasn’t a stranger to worlds at this point. the thing is, saying “this point” doesn’t hold a lot of meaning, because back then, time was a mess. it wasn’t a linear line like we understand it. it was chaotic, with effects happening without anything causing it, and weird loops of effects, just a lot of time nonsense, really. but every now and again somebody would have the idea “let me make a place of my own and try to make some sense of it,” and so they would. these were usually pretty small scale worlds created only by one spirit.

i don’t have much to support this particularly theory, but i believe that the act of “establishing linear time” isn’t something just limited to akatosh. he’s responsible for it on nirn, but on other worlds, that may have just fallen to whoever their creator was. so what we end up with is a sort of time stew, where the “water” is all the crazy time nonsense without any order happening, and the chunks of meat and vegetables or whatever are the timelines of these worlds. those pocket timelines are what you could call “kalpas.”

we know very little about other kalpas. we know of only one by name: lyg, which was an ocean world ruled by the dreugh, which are kinda like lobster people, and it was ruled (and possibly created by) molag bal. whether or not he was an asshole at the time, like he is now, isn’t certain. all we know is that it’s said the “magna-ge” (who i don’t think technically existed yet, so this probably refers to simply other et’ada in the aurbis) “created” mehrunes dagon to destroy lyg and defeat molag bal, which he did. there’s also good reason to suspect that the hist trees that argonians worship, as well as perhaps yokuda or akavir, come from other kalpas. also, apparently the ayleid king umaril’s dad was from another kalpa, but that’s all we really know.

anyways, back to the main story. lorkhan tells everybody this idea, and with a little strong-arming from kynareth, everybody agrees to contribute and help out. some people were really enthusiastic, like this guy named magnus, who offered to be the world’s architect and help design it.

first things first: they needed to make room for the world. so in the “middle” of the aurbis (the aurbis is kinda infinite, so there’s technically no middle. you could call it maybe the “metaphysical” center of the aurbis, perhaps a place with the strongest concentration of creatia), they made a big “bubble” that kept the aurbis out, and the “mundus,” as it came to be called, in.

then, they started the real work. they took the creatia they had sectioned off and started building in earnest. some folks even offered up some of the scraps from their own personal world projects to help. (this is how those other kalpas intersect with ours, and why nirn has dreugh, and umaril’s dad, and maybe yokuda, akavir, and hist.) it was all going pretty well, and most folks were getting into it. maybe even that akatosh guy, but he’s just a grumpy asshole, so who cares.

but uh, people started getting sick. and weak. and uh. dead. it was weird and so they talked to lorkhan about it. he said, “oh, uh, yeah. about that. you see, uh. that kinda has to happen for this to work, because this thing’s gonna need a lot of creatia and divine energy and stuff, so-”

but most people stopped listening after hearing he knew people would die for this, and started yelling and grabbing torches and pitchforks and stuff. even magnus and kynareth were upset. and akatosh jumped on all this hating-lorkhan energy, because he really hates lorkhan, and decided they should all get together and talk about this somewhere. maybe some place fancy, and kinda powerful. magnus said, “i got you, my man,” and built a fancy tower, that was also powerful, from some of his building notes he’d made with lorkhan.

so what happened on the top of that tower was Convention. akatosh convinced everybody to kill lorkhan, except he wouldnt die, not even when he made his loyal knight trinimac literally rip his heart out. so akatosh said “fuck it” and stuck it on an arrow and shot it across the world.

so lorkhan’s dealt with, and now everybody had to decide what to do. magnus was feeling really betrayed and sad and kinda guilty so he said, “i’m just gonna leave.” and a bunch of his friends and family left with him, just kinda shooting through the bubble from mundus to aurbis, like slamming open a door and not even bothering to close it behind you, to show how mad they were. that’s magnus, the sun, and the magna ge, the stars.

then some folks said, “yeah, i’m not really feeling this anymore, either, but we might as well see what happens to it, now that it’s almost done,” and they ran off to the empty space around the world, which they called oblivion, and made some little personal worlds to chill in, and occasionally screw with nirn from. those are the daedra.

some folks still wanted to see this work out, though. some, who had already given so much of themselves for this, decided to go all the way, and gave the rest of their divine essence to help stabilize the world. some of them decided to just stay and live there. these are the earthbones and the ehlnofey respectively.

akatosh and approximately seven of his friends (the aedra) were like, “i guess we’ll look like assholes if we don’t give a little more to help too....” so they did, but then they also hightailed it out of there. they also poked holes in the bubble, but they kinda just.....stood in the doorway? mundus in front, aurbis in the back kinda deal. but one of the most important things akatosh did before he left was straighten out time on nirn so that effect usually always followed the cause, so we have linear time. (he’s an asshole, and not very competent, and fucks up a lot, sometimes for like, a thousand years at a time, but, i guess he tried.)

okay, that’s sort of the history stuff out of the way. let’s talk about whatever the hell CHIM is, and what Towers are, and all that.

so, basically, what lorkhan saw when he looked at the aurbis from the void was The Tower, which is also the First AE. now, it’s not a literal tower. that’s mostly metaphor. but in this world, ideas are reality, so the metaphor is real, too.

that’s important because it means that even though it’s this huge, nearly incomprehensible thing, you can use different ideas and metaphors to represent it to make it easier to understand.

in essence, what The Tower represents is power and the pure essence of will. it’s the first thing to exist, so it has to be very powerful, and be very strong in its desire to exist. that power and desire sort of colors everything that exists within it - so everything within anu/the First AE is in some way always going to be similar to it. if anu contains every thing that exists within it, that means anu always has at least one relationship with them: that they exist within it and because of it. in this way it has a sort of power over everything that is derived from it.

so technically, The Tower, a.k.a. anu, is the “First Tower,” but we don’t usually call it that, mostly because while time itself begins with its creation, linear time doesn’t. so it’s hard to say what comes first. but literally the first thing that happens on nirn is the creation and establishment of the first Tower, the adamantine tower, on the top of which Convention was held, lorkhan killed, etc. the one who was in control of Convention, akatosh, is therefore the “ruler” of that tower.

remember that i said a metaphor actually embodies what it represents. so the adamantine tower is in a way THE Tower, or at the very least a very potent reflection of it. it embodies the same, or a very similar power, which is to say it holds a great amount of sway of what’s within it. now, in this case, it’s not necessarily what’s within adamantine tower - it’s what surrounds it, and what it represents. it is surrounded by much of the continent tamriel, and it represents the establishment of linear time by akatosh. it essentially amplifies and solidifies the AE of its “ruler” and gives it much more control over reality than it would otherwise. it can turn an ant into a god, if an ant somehow became “ruler” of a tower like that.

you may notice i keep saying “ruler” in quotation marks. it’s a bit of a strange concept. sometimes “ruler” means a towers’ creator or commissioner, sometimes it means the person who “owns” the tower, sometimes it simply represents the will of the people within its “jurisdiction.” in the case of adamantine tower, its “ruler” is not magnus, who made it, but almost exclusively akatosh. it’s his will that it guarantees, his AE that it amplifies. generally, one who wishes to be “ruler” of a tower must already have a great deal of power, either physical, magical, ideological, political, etc. akatosh had a lot of basically every kind, but mostly political, i think.

the et’ada made the first tower, and inadvertently the second (red mountain), but it was mortals who made the rest. each tower has a “stone,” which is sort of like the thing that really holds it together, a way to properly attune to The Tower. adamantine tower has some kinda unknown stone; red mountain’s stone is literally lorkhan’s heart. one of the most significant and well-known towers, the white-gold tower in cyrodiil, has as its stone the chim-el adabal, the great big red stone in the amulet of kings, which is said to be the crystallized blood of lorkhan’s heart as it passed over cyrodiil on its way to vvardenfell.

there are other towers: the orichalc tower of yokuda, about which little is known except that it’s probably no longer active; snow-throat, which is the throat of the world mountain in skyrim, with a stone said to be a “cave”; green-sap, which is not one tree but many trees in valenwood, whose stone is the “perchance acorn” that grew it; crystal-like-law in summerset isle, with a stone called “transparent law” that fell in and likely deactivated during the oblivion crisis at the end of the 3rd era; and most notably, walk-brass.

walk-brass tower was created by the dwemer to be a perfect god. also called numidium, anumidium, akulakhan, etc., it has had a profound influence on the history of tamriel. its heart has changed a couple of times: first, it was also the heart of lorkhan, but this was later replaced by the mantella, an extremely powerful soulgem which contained the soul of the underking ysmir, and the imperial battlemage zurin arctus. numidium is associated with several “un-time events,” also known as “dragon breaks” because it’s basically when akatosh fucks up keeping time. it made its creators, the dwemer, disappear in the 1st era; something happened when it was activated after being rebuilt in rimmen, elsweyr; and it’s responsible for the mess that is the warp in the west, which is how daggerfall made all of its many endings canon.

really, the only major towers, at least in game so far, have been numidium, red mountain, and white-gold. numidium, as well as its recreation as akulakhan, feature heavily in daggerfall and morrowind; red mountain also serves as a major plot point and set piece in morrowind; and white-gold is a set piece in oblivion, as well as a perennial prize that has been fought over throughout history. also - all of these towers are no longer active. most towers are no longer active, if any. the ramifications of this isn’t really known, but are probably bad.

red mountain is of special note because its stone, the heart of lorkhan, was able to be tapped into via special dwemer tools to grant individuals godlike powers. this is how the tribunal - vivec, almalexia, and sotha sil - as well as their enemy dagoth ur, achieved their godhood. it’s not really known if this is a potential property of any tower, or if the stone of red tower being the literal heart of a god made it unique.

but godlike power is not the only kind of power these towers provide. they are a way for powerful people to manipulate the surrounding reality as they see fit, merely by willing it so. for instance, the white-gold tower, being one of the most powerful, has helped solidify the various empires that have obtained it, from the first empire of alessia to the most recent of the septims. (since it was deactivated at the end of the 3rd era, it’s unlikely the mede empire enjoys its benefits.)

the tribunal used the power of red mountain (and specifically, its heart) to establish their divine rule over morrowind; the dwemer wished to become perfect and divine; dagoth ur tried to do the same with akulakhan; green sap of valenwood binds its people to the green pact; white-gold has served as the empire’s capital and seat of power for millennia; and you could perhaps say that snow throat of skyrim gives the greybeards their power and isolation, as well. a tower is a political power as much as it is a metaphysical one. in fact, since ideas shape reality in the elder scrolls, those two powers are the same!

now let’s wrap this up by talking about chim and mantling for a second. a lot has been said about chim, and i think probably too much. if we go by what i’ve outlined as the essential nature of reality (that ideas directly shape reality) and The Tower, a.k.a. the First AE (the first thing to ever exist that encompasses everything that exists), some of what vivec has said about chim, and smudge some of the lines here and there, we can simplify it a lot.

essentially, chim is the closest you can get to what lorkhan saw when he looked back on the First AE from the Void. it’s not actually possible for mere mortals to achieve that; the closest we can do is sort of like a training exercise, kind of like sparring, except we’re sparring with the nature of reality itself.

let’s break this down really clean. say some bloke, let’s call them ceviv, wants to get enlightened, or something. ceviv has this thing in them that makes them exactly who they are, and no one else; they have an essential spiritual essence that clearly says, “this here is ceviv, and that there is the rest of the world, but that’s not me, and i’m not that.”

now, we’ve already established that the sum of existence, “anu,” is very much the same. it possesses an intrinsic nature that says, “this here is anu, and that there is The Void, a.k.a. my brother padomay, but he’s not me, and i’m not him.”

now let’s say ceviv looks anu dead in the eye and says, “this here is ceviv, and that there is anu, but why is he not me, and why am i not him?” the intended revelation, of course, is that “oh, he is me, and i am him.” except, if you’re anu, and not ceviv, then ceviv doesn’t exist anymore. that’s what “zero-summing” is. it’s realizing you’re part of “capital-G God,” but in the process losing sight of what part.

but let’s say ceviv has a really strong AE. they’ve really been hitting the spiritual-essence-of-existence gym. they look into anu’s eyes and say, “this here is ceviv, and that there is anu, and i am him, but he is not me.” anu contains ceviv, but isn’t ceviv; for anu to admit he was just ceviv would mean he’s not the hugely infinite thing he actually is.

the result of that outcome is chim. it’s saying, “i’m God, but God isn’t me.” you’re placing yourself on the same playing field as anu, but you’re also separating yourself from him by retaining your AE, the borders of your being.

except.....not quite. like i said, in the mundus, that sort of ultimate achievement isn’t quite possible. within mundus there is something of a simulacrum of anu that you can do this to, and it puts you on even ground with that, meaning you blow your AE up to the size of mundus, but not the aurbis as a whole. lorkhan is literally the only person, as far as we know, who has done the latter. so vivec’s cool and all, pretty powerful metaphysically or whatever, but he’s still not the coolest.

ok, let me clarify mantling, because it’s a related concept. the saying “walk like them until they walk like you” is a pretty good summary. basically, it’s doing the chim thing, but instead of looking anu in the face, you look somebody else within anu in the face. you say, “this here is me, that there is you, and i am you, and you are me,” similar to the zero-sum. except since you’re not comparing yourself to the whole of existence, it’s possible to work it out without ceasing to exist. it’s basically a battle of AEs - whichever one wants to be “it” the most.

just like we say that gods and daedra and what-have-you have “spheres of influence” or “dominions” or whatever, which is basically just whatever their particular thing is (hermaeus mora’s about that forbidden knowledge, clavicus vile’s about those deals, mara’s about lovey-dovey shit). technically, though, you don’t have to be a god or whatever to have a “sphere.” everybody sort of has their “thing,” which is usually just, you know, you doing you. but nobody wants to metaphysically become something that boring. no offense.

so basically you just start copying them and doing what they do. naturally you can’t just all of a sudden BE them. you’re still you, you’re just doing what they do. but if you do it right, you might almost convince the other guy that you actually ARE them. then they’ll start copying you, too. and eventually, there’s not really any way to tell who’s who, and if it even matters, anyways. that’s mantling.

okay, i’ve been sitting on this post and working on it for too long, so if i missed anything, well, i never called this a masterpost. but absolutely feel free to add your own ideas or ask if you need anything explained better! i’m always willing to help!

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