» Fri Mar 22, 2013 4:10 pm Feona Barrowhart
College of Winterhold
Those acquainted with contemporary scholarship on the Ontology of Earthbones will quickly recognise the debate which the present treatise hopes to inform. For those less versed in this lively field of study, my title refers of course to the controversy a certain magister of the Whispering College of Blacklight recently ignited with the now infamous words: 'This grey maybe is a nest of snakes and all the Gods have flown'. The mage in question's immediate devouring by a flock of Nibenian Humming birds should not be dismissed out of hand, even in light of the important and timely work the scholar still contributes to the field of Thaumaturgy (albeit in Wraithsong).
It is my unhappy task to inform those who have not followed the subsequent literature that debate has largely centred on the second part of the Whisperer's (whose both name and flesh have now sadly been carried away in so many fluttering bellies) proclamation. Since these famous words were confirmed to have passed into Convention by the order of Moths every scholar from the Synod or any of the Colleges has added his or her interpenetration on what is now plainly written in The Elder Scrolls. Quite understandably, the concept of a Mundus abandoned by its creators fits neatly into the doom-saying narratives that have become especially fashionable in light of "Empire Actual"'s recent troubles.. However, the purpose of this present paper is to add to the unfortunately slight scholarship on the first premise in the Bird-Eaten scholar's divination.
What use can be gleaned from the premise that mundus is a "Nest of snakes"? The accepted role of the Snake in mainstream Mythontology is as a mask of Doom Drum, the serpent binding and grasping us to this mortal coil (coiled snake, hidden dragon). This, at least within Synodic accounts of the controversy, seems to be the accepted transliteration of "nest of snakes". This is however a frighteningly Aldmeri-centric supposition, quite remarkable from the quills of the staunchly Cyrodiilian Synod. In the Crystal-Like-Canon, the dichotomy of Serpent and Dragon (Snake and Drake, goes the nursery rhyme) is drawn time and time again. Quite often this emantiomorph is shoe-horned into debates quite alien to the tension between finititude and eternity, space and time. This scribe finds the influence Aldmeri ideas continue to this day to exert on mannish scholarship quite astonishing.
There are other snakes in mythohistory. One does not even need to tread into the untamed Reach to find stories of a pre-historical snake, again as a symbol of mortality, but in a crucially distinct sense to the Aldmeri serpent. Throughout excavated burial chambers in all of Skyrim's holds there have been found murals dedicated to some great Snake God. Upon their discovery, some scholars quite lazily equated the Snakeman of Ald-Nedia with Doom Drum's snake mask. This complacency is quite astonishing. If these scholars had taken the time to interview but one of the Draugr that still roam these tombs, or any of the very extant cults devoted to the Old Ways, a radically different story would have presented itself.
In the years since the first empire orders dedicated to the warding of the Proto-Nedic Snakeman were not, as one might assume, subsumed into Shezzar or Shezzarine institutions. As a matter of fact these orders remain to this day, in the form of the recently rejuvenated "Halls of the Dead", found in every major Nordic settlement. As far as we can tell, the Proto-Nedic Snakeman became Orkey, became Arkay (shedding his snakeskin), as continual waves of southern theology washed over Skyrim.
It is unclear at what point the Snakeman became "Old Knocker". One popular theory equates the Snakeman instead with the warrior-spirit Triminac, the mythic shortening of the Nede's lifespan taken literally as the slaughter Triminac unleashed upon mankind. It is useful at this point to note a parallel with contemporary debate in the Aldmeri schools. Heglan Direnni (former Dean of Sunbeam College, Firsthold, now a repatronised Balfierian) has written at length on the scale-maned Bad Man in the mythology of the lands once ruled by his ancestor clan. The Nedes are often described as cannibals who "swallow up mer whole with jaws like snakes". Curiously, it is always in stories where the Lorkhan anologue is an enemy god, where he is depicted a snake.
It is this line, of Snake-As-Enemy, that can be traced all the way back into Adaetology. A recent excavation of Saarthal unearthed certain tablets that appear to date many thousand years older than the settlement itself. Quite puzzlingly, these tablets appear to be so old that some paelonumegicans have dated them to be either artifacts from the pre-history of a kalpa twice removed from our own, or, in the oroborian school, from the final days of our own cycle. As incredible as these claims are, what is certain is that the runes on these tablets probably represent the oldest stories told ever discovered on Tamriel in the Elnofex.
It should not surprise the Jhunal-touched amongst this scroll's readers that prominent in near all of the hymns written on these di-antediluvian tablets is a snake. Specifically, a snake that clasps at our heels and binds us to the spot - ala the Aldmeri Lorkhan. What is curious is that it is this snake (also translated "worm"), that we are warned will consume us again and again, much like the Nordic Alduin. These appear to be just two of the aspects of the serpent that, on way to eating its own tail, first consumes us. The oldest symbol of mortality. It would appear even the Earthbones feared something that wriggled in the dirt.
The most striking aspect of the Sarthaal Tablets was not the inclusion of the snake figure (snakes after all are common to all Tamrielic mythic paradigms), but the only other mentioned: a bird. The bird figure is written, in various tablets, being devoured by the serpent, eating the serpent, and escaping it. The intended order of these tablets is unknown. What is striking is the juxtaposition of bird with snake, a central dichotomy not found in any of Tamriel's established religions.
In many of the oldest religions we encounter snakes that bind dragons, foxes that escape snakes and dragons alike, birds that rip out the hearts of snakes. The totems shift, and as cultures become more "sophisticated", the animalistic aspects are often dropped: totems become hero-kings, become ancestors, and so on. Attempts to reconcile disparate creation myths have been popularised by the Temple Zero Society, the so-called "monomyth" starting with a dialectic of two, from which sub-gradients flow. A mixing of an original two to bring a one, of which an opposite is made, and so on. The success of this project is a subject of debate. It has been widely criticised as Cyrodcentric in its view: a political gesture first, a serious theological prospect second - the idea that all the faiths of Tamriel might in a sense all be true at once, despite their contradictions, holds obvious political advantages.
Putting attempts to reconcile all of Tamriel's belief systems together aside, there is one belief-map still practised within the Empire where the two proto-figures are a bird and a snake, as the Elnofey who made the Saarthal Tablets seem to have believed. Intriguingly, the adherents to this system live not far from Saarthal itself, suggesting their beliefs may share a causal chain with these ancient ones. The nomadic denizens of The Reach, as many of you will know, are a particular topic of interest to me, and it is through my studies of these people that I have come upon a novel answer to the puzzle this present piece addresses.
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The author appears to have reached the end of her scroll. You check the next pigeon-hole for the second part of the essay, but find it missing. Someone must have borrowed it. You approach the Orcish librarian to discover when it might be returned.
