As a long time but sporadic ES fan, I've always been interested by the 'deep lore', only to inevitably be disappointed at the apparently illogical, self-contradicting nature of it all.

The community scrambles to anolyze tidbits by MK, who himself admits that much of it (the Sermons of Vivec, at least) was written while he was drunk and high.

When we're told "daedric and aedric spirits are ideas, feelings, and objects all at once" it is all too easy to roll our eyes in disgust as if the developers had claimed the ES universe was powered by round triangles.

But I'm not ready to disregard the entire universe as "just not rational", so I'm willing to look at it from another perspective.

It goes like this:

"Two spheres--one white, one black--existed in colorless, infinite, three dimensional space. They overlapped, creating what we would call a grey area, and then the white sphere overwhelmed the black. The white sphere dreamed about everything else."

This is not exactly controversial, but I don't think we fully accept the implications. There is no Mundus. There is no oblivion. There are no daedric princes. Thus there is no reason to apply any type of rational consistency to the dream.

ONLY the meta-lore has this requirement. Any attempt to rationally reduce the dream with syllogisms or equations must neccisarily fail.

The creatures and worlds (or is there a difference!) we see are just like the id, ego, and superego of a human represented in a dreamscape.

And that's what's so unique about it.

I always thought the Sermons were essentially in-universe propaganda meant to secure the Tribunal's position as the primary objects of worship of the Dunmer. They're not real, but people keep taking them seriously (in-universe and out).

This kind of thing is actually quite common in mythology. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AnthropomorphicPersonification. Lots of deities in polytheistic religions are an abstract concept or idea given recognizable form and human level intelligence. For instance, Aphrodite and Venus are love, among other things, and the Grim Reaper is death. The biggest difference between Kynareth and Horus is that Kynareth actually makes the occasional appearance and has empirically provable power.

Thanks for the reply, C4B4L.

I think you are straying into the abyss of trying to rationalize the world that the dream seems to depict. All we can look at is the subjective experience of the Godhead.

Kynareth does not have empirically provable powers, because there is no reality beyond the meta-lore.

Don't worry too much about it. Much of the stuff will never actually end up being relevant to the game world, and the stuff that does make it into the games is usually filtered through a "mundane" lens. When you met Pelinal in KotN, he did not look like a robot with a laser hand, but a man in knight's armor. And when you met Vivec, it became clear that he was not all-powerful or unknowable, but simply a very wise and powerful being backed into a corner. Bethesda is free to utilize, interpret, ignore, or even retcon his stuff however they like.

I've figured the same. Unless the Trial of Vivec is taken into account, in which case it also serves as a coded confession of the truth from Vivec.

It's one thing to overlook small details--every universe has them--but it is another to overlook those apparent contradictions that are woven into the fabric of the lore.

I apologize if I was unclear.

Maybe. But trying to find answers, even where there are none, is more fun. It invites refection & critical thought, which (as far as I'm concerned) can only be a good thing. Throwing one's hands up & saying "well, it doesn't have to make sense anyway!" is certainly one way of looking at it, but just because there is no one answer, why not make an answer?

Why only the metaphysical lore? If everything a dream, with no need for consistency, why should the year 2921 follow 2920, or things not fall sideways If the top level doesn't have to make sensewhen dropped? If the base level ofa system has no requirement for consistency, nor does anything else.


But if you look at real-world dream anolysis, there is potentially some degree of sense to be made. Not much, certainly no categorical answers, but some answers to some things. So it is with ES lore. We get pieces of the puzzle, just not the whole thing.


Also, "meta-lore" (to me, at least) soulnds like lore about lore, or the lore community. Apologies for any confusions that result.

Michael Kirkbride was a drunk genius person, so anything from him should be taken with a grain of salt.

Amarithius, I choose the term "meta-lore" to refer to the lore about the Godhead, as listed in my OP. It is the history of histories. Meta-history.


More on this later...

I thought that bit I responded to was a real-life comment, not a lore comment. Anyway...

A big part of this is the assumption that achieving CHIM actually grants some kind of reality warping power, but I disagree. I believe that while CHIM is a form of enlightenment about the nature of reality, it doesn't actually confer any powers on the enlightened. Vivec claims to have achieved CHIM, but all of his power comes from the Heart and he was either killed by a rather mundane mortal or dragged off to Oblivion against his will. If I were to discover that our reality was actually a dream of a greater being, would that suddenly grant me the power to change the dream as though I were the dreamer? No, as a part of the dream, I am constrained by the rules of the dream as established by the dreamer. I exist within the dream, which exists within the dreamer. To alter the dream, I would need to exist outside of it, which can not happen.

There is a saying in Zen, "Before Enlightenment chop wood carry water, after Enlightenment, chop wood carry water."

The problem with people is they take very narrow things too seriously, the only thing one needs to take seriously is the fact that you don't need to take anything in this fictional world created by writers and game developers too seriously and that everything is subjectable to changes even if there used to have solid evidence to support something.