I'm sorry, but that means nothing. Destruction is just as infinite as time and space. Most Daedra Prince's spheres are just as infinite. I mean, the likes of Hunting and Insanity aren't quite as infinite, but you get my point.

And, if so, what about Jyggalag? Order is a lot less prominent in the universe than what most Princes stand for. Why could they just not obliderate him entirely? What they did seemed to be the best of all thier power put together, to do the best they can to stop him, but it seems to me, that with your theory, they would easily be able to destroy him entirely. (Ignoring the awesome Haskill is Sheogorath theory, for now)

And yes, Daedra and Aedra are practically the exact same thing.

You'd be right, because "The Infernal City" mentions the name of the last warlord of the Imperial City region who was overthrown by Titus Mede; Ocato isn't even mentioned and apparently hadn't ruled in years. What I found a little intriguing is that Titus' son mentions seeing Cloud Ruler Temple in the distance during a hunting trip, but we still don't know if any Blades live there or if the temple is empty. (This was maybe thirty years after the Oblivion Crisis, and the novel is set forty-some years after the Crisis.)

But can order be truly destroyed in the TES universe? We have not one but two Daedric Princes whose spheres encompass order in some way. And even then, many other Daedric Princes utilize order in some way.

but more to the point, The godhead is split in two halfs, Anu and Padomay.
Anu personified is Alduin, and Padomay personified is Shor
all other Et'ada are decended from these

Neither of those points have ruled out the fact that an Aedra shouldn't be so much more powerful than a Daedra.

ALDUIN AND SHOR ARE A HIGHER SUBGRADIENT; ie, have 'bigger' souls. thus they are stronger. And Alduin has trouble with the Leper King.

It should also be mentioned that Almalexia and Sotha Sil, both of whom were powered by the Heart of Lorkhan were able to defeat Mehrunes Dagon.

I am nowhere near as well-versed in these topics as you guys are, but I found this topic fascinating. I went to the UESP Wiki to get some more information, and right off the bat, I found this:

Lorkhan convinces the modern Aedra and other Anu-aligned spirits to give of themselves and aid in Creation. Magnus will serve as the new world's architect. A collection of prominent Padomaic spirits reject his proposals and decide to create worlds using only their own divinities. They are now known as Daedric Princes.

If the Aedra were weakened by the creation of Nirn, then were the Daedra not also weakened by the creation of each one's own plane? Would that not bring the powers-that-be more in line with each other? Granted, the language used to describe the creation of the Mundus is pretty strong in its depiction of the damage done to the Aedra and the spirits, but one could argue that they were acting together, and since some of the Aedra clearly realized what was going on and fled, perhaps the crippling wasn't so destructive to all of them. Of course, since Akatosh did not flee, that wouldn't apply to him ... yet, somehow, the "trap" doesn't seem to apply to him, as he is able to force order upon the chaos that seems to be svcking the divinity right out of all the other Aedra. Maybe his very nature saves him from that, so that he isn't just a shadow of his former self, like the others. I don't know, just a theory. Forgive me if I'm way off base here, but it's just a thought.

They where just as strong as Dagon, EACH. It's like Dagon fighting two other versions of himself. He's going to lose. 2v1 can't be fair.

Lordmidnight:

Well this is really hard to actually understand. A lot of people will speculate that the Daedra IS the realm. His physical manesfestation is just an avatar. A puppet, of sorts. The realm isn't made by the prices, it IS them.

Another theory is, as you said, the Daedra made thier own realms in a similar way to the Aedra. Daedric planes are a helluva lot less simple than Mundus. It's like the difference between a detailed portrait of a human face, and a stickman. One takes a lot less effort than the other.

Either way, I don't see why an Aedra could possibly overpower a Daedra.

I know we kind of moved on from this point but I think this bears mentioning:

Someone had mentioned "myth" earlier and I would clarify the term as "mantling". What Martin does, and what the CoC does in KotN and SI, is mantling. As Akatosh sacrificed parts of himself to create the world, so Martin sacrifices his blood (life) to save it. We should suspect that Martin has had a number of experiences leading up to this (perhaps similar to CoC's in SI, though not directly); Martin, a priest of Akatosh, reenacts the deeds of Akatosh (e.g. sacrifice; among perhaps others off-camera) and becomes the Avatar of Akatosh. The question isn't can an Aedra defeat a Daedra - we've never seen such a battle. The question is can the Avatar of an Aedra defeat a Daedra (or perhaps a Daedra's Avatar)? Oblivion seems to be saying yes; perhaps it has something to do with sacrifice/mantling (the Avatar of a Daedra is the physical incarnation of a Daedra but the Avatar of an Aedra (specifically e.g. Martin/Akatosh) seems to come through mantling/sacrifice), or perhaps it has something to do with the mythical apotheosis of the Hero (see Joseph Campbell on this one).

Aside: what I am suggesting here is that Oblivion's "hero story" has nothing to do with the CoC - you are in fact a side character. The main character, or Hero, of ESIV is Martin - he is a resistant hero (Daedra worshipper/priest), crosses the threshold into the mythic life (Kvatch), goes through various initiations (off-screen; though the Blades serves as the Allies), descends into the Underworld to attain the greatest boon (Mysterium Xarxes - he is joined to it), and having attained the boon he attains apotheosis (Avatar), and saves Mundus. The usual "freedom to live" aspect of the Hero's Journey is given to the people of Mundus, not Martin, just as the people of Middle Earth are freed and Frodo cannot stay in the world. Interesting.

If you're correct, it would mean that there would be least three times as much power in Lorkhan's disembodied heart as Mehrunes Dagon manifesting himself on Nirn.


Nice to see someone acknowledging the latter theory.

"To kill Man is to reach Heaven, from where we came before the Doom Drum's iniquity. When we accomplish this, we can escape the mockery and long shame of the Material Prison.

"To achieve this goal, we must:

"1) Erase the Upstart Talos from the mythic. His presence fortifies the Wheel of the Convention, and binds our souls to this plane.*

"2) Remove Man not just from the world, but from the Pattern of Possibility, so that the very idea of them can be forgotten and thereby never again repeated.

"3) With Talos and the Sons of Talos removed, the Dragon will become ours to unbind. The world of mortals will be over. The Dragon will uncoil his hold on the stagnancy of linear time and move as Free Serpent again, moving through the Aether without measure or burden, spilling time along the innumerable roads we once traveled. And with that we will regain the mantle of the imperishable spirit."

White-gold was the echo of Ada-mantia Nu-Hatta expressly warned was coming. Talos is no longer the hub, bearing the Wheel; his sons are dead; the Dragon was mantled.

*In the case of our schizophrenic visionary, however, the role of the mad, terribly suffering god at the summit of the universe was felt to be too much for him to assume. ... That perhaps would be the ultimate test of the perfection of one's compassion: to be able to affirm this world, just as it is, without reservation, while bearing all its terrible joy with rapture in oneself, and thereby madly willing it to all beings!** - Myths to Live By; Schizophrenia, the inward journey

**But this was a trick. As Lorkhan knew, this world contained more limitations than not and was therefore hardly a thing of Anu at all. Mundus was the House of Sithis. ... "This Heart is the heart of the world, for one was made to satisfy the other." - Heart of the World
To reiterate:
Lorkhan is the Spirit of Nirn, the god of all mortals. - Spirit of Nirn

But we are still comparing infinites, right? It may be a portrait vs. a stickman, but it's an infinite portrait vs. an infinite stickman. And, couldn't it be that planes of the Daedra, created by each his own, took as much from each Daedra as was taken from the Aedra in the joint creation of the Mundus? Since Nirn is more complex than Oblivion, a single Aedra (or Daedra, for that matter) couldn't have created it. But together, the Aedra were able to form an infinite with complexity by expending the same "energy" as a single Daedra in the formation of the simpler, but still infinite, Oblivion? Of course this all relies, as you pointed out, on the notion of "creation." If the Daedra created nothing, and the planes are the Princes, then this theory doesn't hold up.

But there is another: the Dawn Era, being without linear time, cannot be defined by the thermodynamic arrow of time (or Akatosh's arrow, maybe). Which means that the presence of Akatosh during the creation and the "trap" cannot be pinned down. The only thing that can be placed in a mortal context would be the creation of the Adamantine Tower. So it is entirely possible that Akatosh simply wasn't effected by the creation of the Mundus in the way that the other Aedra were. His role as time itself puts him outside of the realm of events until he chooses to solidify time. So perhaps Akatosh would be the only Aedra who could take on Dagon (hey, that was a poem! It was a stupid poem, but it was a poem nonetheless).

Personally, I've always taken the "infinite" angle as mortal failure to differentiate between infinite and "really really big/far/massive".

The Daedric planes ARE the daedra, in the same way that Aedric Planes are Aedra. The reason why they gave peices of themselves to make Mundas is it was nobodies plane, it is anchored in existanve not by worship but by Towers. This is why if the towers go, then Mundas goes, and then The Godhead wakes up because there is no worship going on.

http://www.imperial-library.info/content/cosmology
Of course, you could always hope the next TES game completely ignores all that, like Oblivion tended to do with various things.

Why can't you have an infinite bigger than another infinite? For a math anology, think {... 0, 1, 2, 3, 4,...} as compared to {... 0, 2, 4, 6, 8,...}.

I'm well aware of that. I just choose to take mortal lore on such things with a grain of salt. When something talks about infinite distances and mortal mental stress explaining how everything in the sky appears to us (especially considering the text was exclusively written by mortals), I take it with a heap of salt. But if I have to go along, I interpret it that "mortal mental stress" makes us come up with explanations for what we see but cannot do more than stand here and observe.

But does that necessarily mean that these things must work only as one would most expect from the real world?

There's already plenty of evidence that plenty of related stuff doesn't. But I don't think that everything has to work differently.

Even if there are things that don't work differently, you can't simply assume which concepts fall into that category unless they've already been explicitly defined as such.

I don't. But the only mortal groups that has done any serious astronomical observation are long gone.

That would be an example of assuming that the universe's mechanics work similarly to the real world, given only the claim that mortals are not a credible source for lore on the relevant subject. If they are indeed not a credible source of information, then all you have is that the information they present is non-credible or questionable at best and should not be very seriously considered, but it is not enough to affirm a hard counter-theorem - that would require another (credible) source to provide the information from which said conclusion must be built upon, of which there isn't one in this case. Lore of the cosmos itself in TES isn't all too plentiful as it stands right now. I believe there were attempts to investigate the cosmos first-hand (Mananauts), but they were mostly a failure from what I understand, other than perhaps gaining a few tidbits of information. Until these explorations become physically (magically?) viable in some way, it is likely that we won't be seeing highly credible information. But without the means of neither gaining nor utilizing the information, perhaps whether the true nature of this concept differs from the currently "established" literature, and, if so, how it is different, isn't yet relevant at this point of time in the TES universe. What is thought to be true does still speak volumes, although possibly only indirectly.

I do have counters; in-game physics and observations. Physically, everything behaves similarly, albeit with less gravity, something that assuming calculations that others on this forum have made regarding Nirn's size, makes perfect real-world sense. The physical aspects of the cosmological assertions are inconsistent with the physics demonstrated on both Nirn and on several different planes of Oblivion. Futhermore, in the Shivering Isles there is a star in the sky much like Magnus, whereas the Deadlands either has no such nearby star or is near a dead star, implying that they're in different locations. And also importantly, the mortals on Tamriel don't even know much of what lies beyond their own continent, it's like reading texts from early Dark Age Europe.

This is still inductive. You can see that objects (on Nirn) are pulled towards Nirn, and that other celestial objects (the two moons and the stars) revolve in an apparently orbit-like fashion. Still doesn't give you enough information to conclude that, say, the moons cause a tidal effect upon Nirn. (For reference, there are tides on Nirn that are referred to in some of the books, but I don't see any information that deconstructs or attempts to deconstruct the mechanism of which they work; however, this is hypothetically speaking anyway.) anologous does not necessarily equate to homologous.

Esthetically, they are alike, but the operations are different.

Go unto the Shezarrine as a Newton (and he'll either split into eighths or have your baby).