http://img195.imageshack.us/img195/5940/parabolickalpa.jpg


The parabolic kalpa relies on the idea of flux. It relies also on the assumption that the divine is real and relevant, and that we descend from it. As time goes on we are separated more and more from divinity, ultimately reaching a bottom below which we cannot drop. After that extrema, we start to re-discover our connection with our makers, and ascend back up the sides of the curve. As implied by the image of the parabola, the descent is at first very fast and then flattens out and becomes nearly negligible, before steepening again on the ascent.

The connection with the divine can manifest in many ways. Most obviously, it is our separation by birth. The first, sharpest, drop was the first man, mer, or beast born on this world. Connection can also be knowledge - the first peoples had much more understanding of the nature of the world than we do now. Information is lost, forgotten, and misinterpreted, which manifests as the downward curve. Our general faith is of course another variable: how strongly do people believe in our gods and in our fathers? Splinters in philosophy and in religion cause further drops as people venture further from the truth. The upward ascent is governed by similar variables.

We know that our time began with the creation of the mortal plane by the gods, and the subsequent evolution of mortal life. It has also been http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/921446-world-eating-101 that the beginning (creation) of our time (kalpa) is indeed just the end of another time. The Dawn, of course, is so connected to the divine that we are hardly able to discern its events. We know that God and Man walked side by side, and that Towers, whose purpose is now all but forgotten, were the cornerstone of all Elven society. Alessia, Morihaus, and Pelinal's numerous incarnations are not out of place in the early first, and neither are the God-Kings of Morrowind or the Brass God of the Dwemer. Even the conception of Reman Cyrodiil late in the first era is fantastical in comparison with the mundane births of our modern emperors.

All this leaves us with the question of where on the parabola we are currently located. We are doubtlessly towards its flatter bottom, though we cannot know for certain whether we have passed the minima and are on the ascent. I would argue that we are, as evidenced by the recent events throughout the Empire. In Morrowind, Lorkhan's heart has been destroyed (liberated?) at the hands of a mysterious reincarnation of the cultural hero Nerevar, Sotha Sil and Almalexia are dead, and Vivec has disappeared after a most unusual trial. In Cyrodiil, the Dragon Fires have been extinguished, the Amulet destroyed, the Septim line broken, and Dagon defeated by Akatosh himself. Subsequently, Umaril Half-Elven returned from the Aether, and was once again banished with the help of Pelinal Whitestrake. This increase in mythological activity, and the rise in awareness of the subject that comes along with it, must mean that we are on the rise towards a greater unity with the divine.


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Had this lying around for a while, found it while cleaning up my folders. Thought I'd post.

Its not really a theory, since it doesn't present anything awfully revolutionary. More like a way of visualizing the nature of time. Also an explanation for why Tamriel is so boring now days.

P.S. OMG mah first post on teh new forumz lol

Well, can you really measure understanding of Divines? Can you numerate the parabola in a way that it can be? My guess is no.

Heh, that reminds me of something I once drew. http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y199/Proweler/Lore/aurbisV.jpg

The legs indicate the division, strong opposites in the bottom, and unity on the top. I tried to use it to illustrated the difference between Anu/Anuiel and Padomay/Sithis. Where on the Anu and Padomay division range can be either divided into void and magicka, the influence of Anuiel through Auriel and Sithis through Lorkhan pulls them together or apart.

i'm not talking about just the divines, but divinity and metaphysics in general. the godhead, chim, lorkhan, towers, all that stuff. in terms of measurement, take a look at theologists in the 3rd era versus those of the loveletter tamriel. or hell, even Alessia, a slave, who was able to realize (probably for the first time among all man) that Lorkhan = Liberty. It is obvious that those who came before and who will come after have an understanding of metaphysics which is closer to the "truth" than the limited views of those in the middle. understanding is also only part of it. how much presence the mythic has in the world is most important.

The parabola have to follow any specific equation or be numerated, its a metaphor.

Makes sense to me. If the x-axis refers to the passing of time, the kalpa, then the end refers to when a single denizen of Nirn learns this "truth", and exercises it, no? Actually, don't answer that, I'm ridiculous.

The Landfall, I assume, ought to be placed towards the end of your graph. It probably takes place somewhere in the Fifth Era, but whether the Loveletter predates it or not is not entirely clear to me.

Looks to me like the cosmos is restabilizing between the Anuic and Padomaic at the same time. Around the time the Aedra's actions against the Padomaic Lorkhan were undone, the Daedra's actions against the Anuic Jyggalag were undone shortly afterwards.

I recall that there's more than one Kapla... so, would that mean Nirn/the Universe isn't so much a single parabola as a it is a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sine_wave? Or cosine, depending where you want the universe to start. I guess for TES, Nirn starts at cos(0)?

Haven't done calculus in a while, sorry. :bonk:

Adanorcil: since the loveletter warns against the landfall, i assumed it had happened sometime between when we recieved the letter (late 3rd era) and the time the letter was written (5E911). If the landfall in the infermal city is the landfall were looking for, then we know that it happened before when the letter would have been sent. whether the letter is now an alternate timeline (a future averted) or not remains to be seen.

what intrigues me most in the letter is this sentence: "The C0DA broke when Twice Vehk appeared again from Aether, but they captured enough of Him to render the words stable again." is this something thats already happened (v's birth, his attaining godhood, or his realization of chim, perhaps), or is it yet to come to pass? i've always read it as a return of vivec from wherever he is now, and its obviously a pretty big, world and perception shattering event. bigger than the landfall itself, i'd say.

Alaisiagae: yep

We know that what happens to Morrowind in the early Fourth Era is not the Landfall. If anything, I believe Jubal-lun-Sul's words were/will be written in the face of apocalypse and he seeks to give the doomed mortal world a little more time to get its act together and finally figure it out.

The deadline (?):

Haven't heard this interpretation before, what is it based on? MK's "this is not the landfall you're looking for" quote? In the movie, those were the droids they were looking for, but were hidden due to trick. I believe in this case it was the landfall we were looking for, but we don't realize this because we were expecting something grander. It may not have lived up to our expectations, but sticking our fingers in our ears and screaming "lalalala i cant hear you" won't change the fact that it was landfall. So unless there is something I'm missing, I'm going to assume that the Minestry of Truth crashing into Vvardenfell and setting off Red Mountain was indeed the Landfall.

On the other hand, there definitely are hints of an apocalyptic, or at least world changing, event other than the landfall. The quote I provided earlier, for example, seems to speak to a much more metaphysical destruction of the world.

The way I see it, the 5th era is this world's last due not to an apocalypse but to the cycling of the kalpa: man become aware and ascendant enough that they become, for all intents and purposes, gods, replacing (seamlessly) the gods of our era. Reality dissolves as the Altmer succeed in their endeavor. Eventually, a rebel rises and advocates return to a mortal world. Rinse, repeat.

Whether I'm "right" or not, I'm liking where this is going.

The kalpa is a cycle of imprisonment and freedom. Mortals will break their chains, to glory in realness, but only for a time, because Alessia's freedom was recently undermined by a bastard.
The parabolic kalpa is impossible though, because a parabola never "cycles," but I understand the astrothurges of a lost kingdom used it for a while... The ouroboros is just a better model.

Subadim: As Alaeg. mentioned, a parabolic cycle would be a sinusoidal graph. the ouroboros is a good model indeed, but it doesn't demonstrate the relationship to divinity which i want to emphasize, only the cyclical nature of time.

Doesn't each Kalpa have exactly one difference?

So she did. I like the sine model, I'm sure there's truth in it.


... one thing is new in every kalpa. I should probably add that. No, I won't tell you...
My speculative hunch: the one new thing is the Rebel. Although he's an eventuality, and you would think predicatable, he arrives under different pretenses for varrying reasons. He must be different by nature, because the witness never tells the same story.

Say the difference in Kalpa(x) is there is no rebel. Could that mean that when men became gods, they in-turn created their own worlds, their own kalpas?

Well, for an unknowable span, there was no Rebel in this world, only Anu. The advent of Padomay came either instantly or after trillions of millenia. In the time since, however there has always been an archetypical Rebel, so the scenario doesn't seem likely. Hypothetically speaking, as we all are, I'd say each god would be an Anu of their own world and all that implies.

This Kalpa theory is interesting because we are already seeing a state of reversion in some of the provinces, such as the re-formation of the Aldmeri Dominion in the South-West and the foretold return of the Ayleids to the Heartlands of Cyrodiil. I've had a feeling that Tamriel is working it's way backwards but perhaps, as you've shown here, simply circling back to another Dawn or Merethic Era.

We can't know what happened before. The Aedra are retroactive, so they would only tell what their listeners believed or wanted to believe. The Daedra might know more, but they cannot be trusted to give a reliable account. Jygglag perhaps, as deception is not his forte, but I doubt he'd have the time or the concern to lecture mortals.

Who said the monomyth was divinely inspired? What if it was formulated through introspective meditation? What if Men were gods once, and so they can remember?

At some point, "either instantly or after trillions of millenia," the kalpa began with the clash of the Enantiomorph. But you're right - if you mean in a historic, scientific way - we "can't know." This was before the mortals' preoccupation with the history of their smoke-and-mirrors world, after all.

Wouldn't it be a http://jwilson.coe.uga.edu/EMAT6680Fa06/Crumley/Unit/6_files/image006.jpg, not a sine graph? Assuming that the left side is the y-axis of a Cartesian coordinate plane.

Which makes a kalpa the integral on the interval [0,π ]. Cool.

EDIT: Bah, not quite, unless you want to include those extraneous areas to the left and right. Kind of stupid to say the kalpa is the area under the curve, then, I guess. Still, cool graph.

Umaril claimed his father was a god from a previous kalpa. So it's likely that this one is not the first.

its a cycle, no real beginning and no real end. therefore, whether its a sin or a cos doesn't matter since their shape is the same.

Okay, so each kalpa can be graphically represented by a parabola which describes reality as protracting away from and then retracting back towards a certain initial (Sithian?) state, over time. By extension, a series of kalaps can be graphically represented as a wave extended over a higher order time (a time which contains the separate times unique to each kalpa).

So, we come to Don't Forget This's point: each Kalpa has exactly one difference. Subadim suggests the rebel. Rather than make any assertions about what the difference is, I want to ask another question: does the one difference between each kalpa impact the way we are to represent it's corresponding parabola? What I mean is, on the wave which represents the whole series of kalpas, will the individual waves all have the same wavelength, amplitude, etc?

Integral of a sine wave... uh, anyone recall what this is? Kaplas might be symptoms (derivative, rate of change) of a grander scheme of metaphysical/mythopoeic (??) forces.

Derivative of a Kapla gives the rate of kapla occurrence.

Wonder if certain forces modify the amplitude?

TES universe = electrical circuit diagram. Nirn and its mortals = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_amplifier?