In the 36 Lessons of Vivec, a Dwemer defines the Eight Worlds as "NIRN, LHKAN, RKHET, THENDR, KYNRT, AKHAT, MHARA, and JHUNAL". The names are pretty obviously the Aedra+Nirn. So where is Zenithar and Dibella in this? Did the Dwemer ignore these gods? Did Vivec intentionally not mention them?

I reckon that dwemer didn't believe the two were present or necessary. What do beauty and communication have to do with anything... Something their mythopoets knew nothing about: telling stories that lasted.

As noted by other people before me, the Sermon is about the Dwemer's inability to understand love as championed by Vivec. In that light, it makes considerable sense Dibella is not in there. The meaning behind Zenithar's omission isn't entirely clear to me either.

Zenithar is more to do with challenges and reward than communication. The Dwemer were a very greedy race, and they'd believe Zenithar would be necessary in his aspect of wealth.

If Dibella has been omitted because of their inability to understand love, why is Mara present? Isn't she the very patron of love?

Pretty much. It'd make more sense to include Dibella (since Dwemer make art and can reproduce sixually) and exclude Mara, whose love is more of the compassion for all things type that Vivec talks about.

Dwemer strike me as a people so dedicated to their grand opus that they would neglect their own sixuality, preferring to clone themselves instead. Over successive iterations, they lose their reproductive equipment entirely, becoming wholly dependent of cloning - rather like many depictions of Grey Aliens.

Uh-uh, not in this instance. He personifies communication. Commerce is communication. Communication and beauty/sixuality had everything to do with their tonal architects' schemes. So its ironic they're missing. If they don't know love, how are they going to create? They can't, because they're missing Zenithar and Dibella.

^What Haute said. They're afraid of intimacy. They reduced face time to telepathy. They reduced motherhood to tubes and vats. six was removed. Cities were constructed to avoid contact with each other. Greetings were awkward. Child birth was hard. Women wanted more than men who provided.

So work removed woman and child. There was only work, war, and wages. Coins inserted into slots, so that dead metal seemed to come alive. Maybe pride occured to those craftsmen, but why? As their slaves' gears tickled awake, the dwarves watched- and they died.

Now those cities left were cities of this lifestyle. Those who gave up everything for the dream corrupted their countrymer, who wanted nothing more than to live, so that everyone shared Kagrenac Industry's doom at Red Mtn.

So, it seems wrongheaded to me to say that the Dwemer feared intimacy when their goal was the ultimate intimacy of reintegration. It isn't as though cloning would have offered the Dwemer any improvement over natural birth, as they saw things; they would still have been propagating subgradient souls, subjugating spirits to the yolk of the Mundus.

They failed, bro. But ok. You have a better illustration of a Dwemer foremen's life mode, let's hear it. I'm eager and young.

Such was their folly, seeking the tigertouch of Divinity when had a child's grasp of mattress-chivalry


Naturally, they would have methods of ensuring that the clones don't develop souls, rather like seedless watermelons. When those buggers were right, they'd metempsychose [soul-hop] into the fresh clone-body and resume tone-smithing.


Mad props, Dude-Bro.

Wasn't Zenithar originally an Imperial or Nordic Shopkeeper? The Dwemer were gone around the time that he GOT a plane(t)

Arkay was thought to be by the Imperials, but it's (probably) not true. And if it is, it's probably only true in a weird, symbolic kind of way.

That Mara supposedly led him into godhood is rather telling, I should think, of Cyrodiilic attitudes towards death.

I was pleasantly surprised where this topic took us.

What can I say? I hate to poo-poo on your and Hottycooteratti's party, but - as per the usual with unknown foreigners - it's unlikely that the Dwemer were all that different from the Aldmer of the time, at least in their day-to-day lives (not even excepting their technology: sunbirds). http://www.imperial-library.info/content/chronicles-nchuleft, our only source on what the Dwemer were actually like, paints them rather unremarkably, interpersonally, and http://www.imperial-library.info/content/chronicles-nchuleft implies that their law developed much in accord with that of the Aldmer, which hardly points to a drastic difference in culture.

As I understand it, the defining feature of the Dwemer was one of degree, not kind; they felt the separation of mortality even more keenly than did the Aldmer, and had the communal pride to judge the Divines for their mistakes and take steps to rectify them. They were a people whose ultimate goal was to sacrifice their individuality, to become closer to each other; the loving abnegation of self and oversoul ascendancy common in many major RL religions. This does not point to widespread interpersonal alienation. I'd like to say that they edged more toward a communal hive-mind, but the Chronicles do not agree.

As for your request - I'll think about it. I have a lot of things bubbling right now, so it'll be a while.


Possibility granted, but I fail to see why the Dwemer would see a need to develop this technology. It's silly to think that just because Vehk did not include Dibella in the Sermons - or even just because the Dwemer did not recognize her - that they did not have six; Dibella's mien includes six, but primarily as a form of artistic expression. Dibella is not intimacy. six as comfort, six as therapy, six as a tool to maintain stable relationships, is entirely outside her spectrum and within Mara's.

You don't like it, there's that dragon war thread you can bite.

But it's your party, too. And sense we're brining http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Nchunak%27s_Fire_and_Faith. History is no reliable witness, either. Fact does not concern me, Admiral.

lolololololololololololol oh u funnay suh.

It's not that I don't like the picture you paint, it's just that as far as I can tell it doesn't fit with the existing lore. Did you even read my explanation?

It was not dwemer who defined this, but Vivec himself. I don't even presuming he wouldn't knew, but what if he did it purposely?