Apologies if I get all this wrong. This is my first time.

So I was thinking about the 36 Lessons and Vivec laying with Molag Bal for eighy-eight days, fathering a race of monsters of which eight survive. It seems to me that this is understood to be his re-enactment of the Aedra-focused creation myth. Through the intermingling of light and dark come eight strange creatures. Now it seems easy to focus on the spawn of this relationship (after all, it does seem that Vivec is putting himself in opposition to the Eight, and the Empire that they are the crown of), but I don't think that we should forget about the metaphorical progenitors. Why are Vehk and Molag playing at Padomay/Anu? And why this particular daedric prince? And crucially, who plays which role?

I think that central to these questions, and more importantly, the one in the topic title, is the nature of Anu and Padomay. Principally, it needs to be understood that "chaos" does not necessarily equal "change". "Order" does not mean the same as "stasis". Often these are in opposition or contradiction to each other. Think entropy. A more "chaotic" state is perhaps more static (if you will pardon my pun). As an example let us consider a tower (a truly loaded symbol if ever there was one). The tower might appear orderly, standing strong and defiant above its surroundings. However, it is crucially unstable by its nature. The way it should be eventually is lying in pieces on the plain around it. The tower is order, but it is fragile, and thus subject to change. The broken heap is disorder and will stay in the "disordered" state for a long time. And so, an "Anuic" force can be one of randomness and an ordered structure can be "Padomaic".

Another example, returning to Daedra as mentioned before. Let's skip neatly over Peryite, after all he is the perfect example of Padomaic order and little needs to be said about that. Surely the Lords of Misrule are more change-aligned than their Divine cousins - this is well established. Let's think about Sheogorath, a truly chaotic god if ever there was one. By his nature he creates irrational and insane structures and appears to rather like subverting and changing things. However he is also Jyggalag - not replacing him or sitting in his seat, he is both of them. The prince of order is an exceptional example of Daedra creating change in nonchaotic ways - his flawless spires are replaced with mad growths, he grows in power and monotony and after a curse or two his polar opposite neatly takes his throne. Then order starts to invade again, lots of fighting happens, and we have another champion of madness. And above all the princes, it is pretty obvious that Sheogorath (and Jyggalag too, perhaps) gets bored of anything that stays sitting still. Truly Padomaic.

But back to Molag and Vivec for a moment - I'd like to raise the possibility that Vivec plays the role of Padomay, and Molag Bal represents Anu. But surely Oblivion is naturally more Padomaic than we mere mortals who float somewhere between is and is-not? Perhaps, but there are certainly elements of Stasis in Molag, especially when contrasted with Vehk. In TESV, he is introduced as having the sphere of domination and enslavement (dictatorship?) - structures of power that resist change. In TESIV, he wants only death and suffering - much the same. In TESIII, he is King of [censored] - disrupter of bloodlines, introducer of disorder (but once blood is impure, it stays impure). So perhaps he is a bit more Anuic than seems apparent. Conversely, Vivec is a wonderful agent of change - mortal, malleable dunmer, both male and female, becoming a God and becoming a mortal again again. The symbolism of towers and The Tower (more on CHIM in a bit) and their inherent instability has already been discussed. His status as the Thief also suggests change (and chaotic change at that). So perhaps the immortal can be less symbols of change than the middle-dwelling mortal.

And with the ideas of random stasis and ordered change in mind, I'd like to stop playing with symbols for a bit and suggest some (hopefully) unusual ideas. Namely, a padhome-geocentric cosmology of the Aurbis. Perhaps this has been brought forward elsewhere, but I haven't seen it before. Normally, the way the cosmos is described in TES consists of mundus being at the centre of the interplay between light and dark, tugged one way by the Aedra our ancestors and the other by the Daedra our corruptors. Some say Mundus is perfectly balanced, some say it is Aedra-skewed and others would have us think that the whole thing is a plane of Oblivion. However, let's assume that instead of being on some kind of monochrome spectrum, the universe is arrange radially, with true change being at the centre of all things.

In the absolute middle is Padhome, whatever that is. Its presence on Nirn is the Heart of Lorkhan, the force for change, men into gods, gods into bones, dwarves into thin air. Crystallising around it, an impossible blip in the vast, static unknowable constantness of the Void, we have Mundus. Lorkhan's creation is a partial expression of CHIM, so I have heard - this makes sense as this big ball of contradictions is just sitting there in the terrifying dark nothing and existing.
The physical towers are both conduits for nothing and also the scaffolding that holds it back. And the red tower also digs down, going more deeper and more padomaic until it houses the heart of all that is. Of course, we all love a good mirror-contradiction, and here's a juicy one. If CHIM, Nirn, existence, is Padomay, what of Padomay as Lorkhan as Sithis? Sithis is "IS-NOT" to the Tower's "IS" and the void crushing in on the Lorkhan-permeated mundus.

Speaking of Lorkhan, we have floating in/around Nirn and sitting between its quarks and leptons a force which is just a shade more Anuic: the dead Aedra. They violated their nature of stasis, and put their souls into the sudden occurrence, and they died for it. What better way for a god to start expressing change than to stop existing? Better still, they can change into sprits/bones and grow up into hearty young Mortals, capable of creating and changing lots of things - possibly even the gods themselves. Now of course we have a whole octave of Aedra which are apparently alive (at least, active) and are the planet-gods orbiting round nirn. It's altogther possible that these are like severed limbs of departed Aedra, still twitching and trying to maintain function, or maybe that the Mundus-bound really are more Padomaic than their Aetherial kin, maybe more so than the Daedra. I certainly haven't ever seen one of the Eight Divines create anything as big as Nirn recently.

Next shell of the mixed-metaphor egg is the water of Oblivion. The daedra are much "closer" to mundus than Aetherius or the Void, both in terms of meaning-spacetime and in philosophy. Of course, the Daedra exhibit the distinctly Anuic property of never really being able to die properly. They can pervert and sculpt to their wits' end, but it never really seems to achieve anything, except perhaps a few ethnic differences here and there. The Ayleids and the pre-Tribunal Dunmer seem to have a sort of hope in the Daedra, although the latter people have become very seperated in ideology now and maybe somewhat closer to transcendence (further up the CHIMney?) than they could have got with those boring old scamp-herds.

The next tier of unchange is Aetherius, and matters are getting really boring now. There's so little Padhome up here, it's like watching paint dry. Here rest the weird and wonderful creatures that backed out of existence when it started getting a little too surprising for them. A good idea if ever there was one, say the Aldmer. Now here (not Nirn) is the Gray Maybe in the new system. And consequently, the sparkling drips of "I don't know / can you repeat the question" that originate from Magnus and other such Aether-dwellers find their way in down to Nirn, through rips in the sky and through Oblivion. This starlight has such an exotic quality of "is/isn't"-"doing/not doing"-"staying/going" when compared to the hyper is-doing-change of Mundus that it manifests as magic, a force that seems to constantly upset Tamriel's nature. It had always seemed to me that magic is too fundamental a force in TES to be the domain of something a straightforward as a god. That's like saying the myths belong to one god - which is almost as much as positing Marukhi monotheism. Anyway, this magic is just the wrong bit of the Anu-Padomay stick ending up in the wrong place. Aetherius is much too static for Nirn - it's like the everflowing time is drying up and leaving strange sludge on its banks. Oh! Time! I nearly forgot about dragons!

So what does the Dawn mean (or any of its Middle visits) in a cosmology where true change is existence is Mundus? Well, it would mean chaos, disorder, and consequently, stasis. Aka keeps things moving and so when you pull his tail things tend to get a little jumbled. The Dawn Era is much like The Tower (and like existence itself in traditional Aurbis cosmology) - it creates something ultimately more confusing by combining many aspects of stasis and change. When time gets muddled, you end up with all the change in your paradoxiverse coming to a halt and ending up on top of itself. Proceeding from this is nonlinearity of time and of causality. The change is still happening, but it's truly unchanging in its nature, and there's nothing to measure it by (unless you have the sugar to see it - note that Lorkhan is the moons and in "Where Were You ... Dragon Broke" they are the "only constant" - contradictory indeed, unless you think that world-eating is a lot like Aedra-tricking). So true Padomay-Anu looks grey which looks a lot like white noise. Background radiation.

Which brings us outside the Lorkhan-bubble to the true nature of Anu: the void. Nothing changes here, and it can't sustain change, not even the shards of it lacerating the Aedras' side - it presses in upon Mundus, and may well some day consume it. Of course, that doesn't make any sense, because it's got nowhere to put the pieces.

What do you think? Is any of this completely stupid? Well, apart from all of this. Does anything support this worldview?

I'll hold off responding until I've had the time to let this sink in. But if this is indeed your first post (and you're not a DL), I want to give you a high five (http://www.imperial-library.info/sites/default/files/dogate_til_fishystick.jpg work too I suppose), I hope you stick around

Oh wow, fishy sticks? I'm stunned they still exist. If my prose sounds archaic it's because I have basically just come from reading archived threads on TIL that are at least five years old and expect to be able to use the same forum in its modern state. Anyway part of the reason I was thinking about alternate systems of cosmology in the TES universe was that I was looking into the birthsigns and which of those are more heavily laden with symbolism. For example, towers, lovers, thieves, lords (if they also happen to be Ruling Kings), shadows (if they are mirror images - exact opposite and yet the same) and definitely serpents. But that's a story for another thread, I guess one which already exists somewhere. What's a DL?

Double login. I just get the impression that sometimes posters will create new forum accounts to post in-character apocrypha or 'float' ideas they may have anonymously.

Your first post here impresses me, that's all