We all know that Akatosh lost his mind on several occasions. I had thought the first was when he killed Lorkhan which was a form of ego suicide, but even before then, Akatosh was already schizophrenic. If he wasn't crazy there never would have been a Lorkhan for him to kill. Then he was further split in the Dragon Break and roughed up in Rimmen and again at Red Mountain. We could assume he had a lucid moment during the Oblivion Crisis, as if the destruction of the Chim-el Adabal woke him up for a spell so that he could turn Martin into his avatar, but that brief moment of saneness was only a preamble to his supposed final insanity as his Alduin persona took primacy in 4E 201.

All this aside was Akatosh born with some sort of original sin-like insanity? Certainly this isn't a Fight Club scenario where only one being existed as there's no denying the existence of Lorkhan. What then happened? Did Akatosh create Lorkhan, pinching off a piece of his mind only to lobotomize it later? Is there any source that details the thoughts of the other et'Ada? In that sense it does remind me of Fight Club, where everyone just sort of rolls with the fact that their leader is out of his mind.

I'd love to see those dinner conversations where Akatosh and Lorkhan are talking, and all the other Aedra are just sorta sitting there laughing nervously.

Anyways, the model that Akatosh lost his mind when he killed Lorkhan never fully explained his insanity to me, as again, he would have had to be nuts already for there to be an alternate, autonomous and quite corporeal personality for him to kill in the first place.

schizophrenia =/= MPD

I've nothing more to add, but I feel that should be cleared up.

He has been described as schizophrenic on occasions, once by MK if I'm not mistaken. A schizophrenic may also have a dissociative personality. I never said they were the same thing. Schizophrenia is thought to be caused by chemical imbalances. DPD is an acquired behavior. While DPD is rare, it's theoretically possible to have them both.

There's no insanity. It's quite sensible in context.

Aka tearing out Zarr's heart is Jesus-caliber self-sacrifice, the god "crucified, offering himself up to himself" to paraphrase a page from Campbell's book.

Zarr?

And it sounds more like Odin than Aka. It takes a true badass to sacrifice yourself to yourself.

Shezarr.

And Shor is Odin. And Shor is Aka.

QED, Aka is Odin.

Yeah, going to agree with XxChaplainxX. Jesus sacrificed himself for the benefit of everyone else, where as Odin sacrificed himself for the benefit to himself (just to nitpick). Something about reading runes, if I remember correctly. Too bad college and grad. students also do the same for much less, depending on the major.

Odin and SheZarr (geez I should have gotten that one...) are still a lot different. Shor is the warrior champion of Mankind, more like Thor... ... ...

Shor... Thor ...

S comes before T...

Well now... that explains a bit.

They were still motivated out of love for all the precious babies and merlings and khajiit kitties, if only retroactively on Aka's part.

I think especially the kitties. Who can't love the kitties?

Me. I prefer dogs.

I'm with you. Stupid moon gazing sugar cats.

Seriously.

Plenty still working on that "incalculable effort."

The Great Dragon isn't crazy. He's complicated, and greater than a single personality.

First, you must realize that normal, non-crazy humans are weirder than you may think. If the two halves of your brain are severed, one half of your mind can continue to function and steer your body all on its own. Essentially, we're all just two people (the two halves of our brain) with amazingly good communication and very similar personalities.

Then you have the divisions of, say, our conscious / subconscious, emotions and reason. I've had parts of myself make my body express anger (by, say, raising my voice or applying too much force when closing a door), and then immediately had other parts of myself express their disapproval of those actions by making an apology out of words.

Finally, consider the fact that who you are depends in large part on where you are. Sometimes, you're a student who'd never dare to interrupt the main speaker to call him a "stupid weasel sphincter". Yet at other times, with friends...
[/AP Psych]

IS necessarily implies IS NOT. They're one functional unit, like the Rebel and the King. The souls of the souls of IS and IS NOT are similarly linked. You cannot have, and never have had Auriel without Lorkhan, or Shezzar without Akatosh. These functional units are called Enatiomorphs, iirc.

But beyond that logical necessity, the enforcer of time's mind is so great, that it must be broken up into many parts. Minor fragments of his mind are superior to entire mortal minds, simply as a matter of function, just as the smallest unit of your mind is thousands of times more complex than the mind of an insect.

However, this all got worse after the whole Dawn debacle, as his corpse became a big mythopoeiac (sp?) puppet, and the self-control part of his mind largely withered away.

Othin hung himself for nine days to learn the runes, it what may very well be a false (or short lived) myth recorded by christian converts trying to make Othin into Yeshua / YHWH. Humans got runes, mead, and poetry when Othin got too smashed and let them slip.

Yeah, I'm definitely going to agree with some above posters in that Akatosh is most likely not crazy just pieces of him are, I believe that if he is "crazy" at any time, it is severely dependant on a few catalysts such as current events and any dissassociation with himself snapping him back into reality for a bit (Breaking of the Amulet)

There is only the god-head. Which is everything.

To understand this properly, imagine that you are floating in a sensory deprivation tank. Blind, without a sense of smell, touch, temperature or taste. Imagine that you are trapped in your own skull with no connection to the outside. Imagine the terror that comes with being all that there is.

There is nothing outside the godhead. This means the limitations come from within.

Now imagine being trapped in your own head, wanting to know who you are. Every thought is possible, there is no limit but those you impose on your thinking. However for any thought to be meaningful, you must limit yourself. As such there can not be a constant without there being change.

This also holds for Akatosh and Lorkhan. They were co-created. One was made to satisfy the other. The fickle mortal plane was made to satisfy the everlasting unchanging heavens. Aka's insanity does not derive from his though. Rather Aka and Lorkhan are joined, staying in balance like entangled particles because this is the nature of the world.

The insanity comes from the nature of the mortal plane. It was created from gift-limbs of the gods and given it's own divinity. A schizophrenic ball of old skins. It is a god made of the parts of gods. These gods having given started to died or simply left left and none remained. But something special happened. The people of the mortal plane had stories of their gods and the world was sympathetic to these stories in the magical sense. The remains of the gods resonated along and filled these stories in with power.

And now Nirn is an idea inside the godhead made of parts of other ideas that are dreaming themselves into existence in nine different ways.

Frankly said the whole thing is bonkers.

While I understand this and have made quiet peace with it since I first grasped the Godhead concept in TES, I don't quite like the simplicity it spells out for lore.

We could literally answer any concept by just saying, "Godhead." It also means that everything is everything, and any enantiomorphic relationships are filigree, meaning nothing more than a tulip's relationship with the idea of an airship never to be built. Frankly put, it's too easy. There has to be some complete disconnect between things.

Now imagine being trapped in your own head, wanting to know who you are. Every thought is possible, there is no limit but those you impose on your thinking. However for any thought to be meaningful, you must limit yourself. As such there can not be a constant without there being change.

So you're saying that Nirn is responsible for Aka's insanity? And by extension Nirn is crazy as well. I'll admit the picture you paint of Nirn and its inhabitants sounds like a powder keg that should have gone off on its conception. Also the myths that give power to the gods are power and refracted personality, reflected back at the gods in a prism of differing thought. That alone should make all gods constantly nuts.

Here's a theory jumping off your last statement:

Aka lends his bones to create Nirn and loses it. The resulting madness drives him to kill Lorkhan, his spiritual doppelganger, which further exacerbates his madness.

I'm not worried about it. The concept has not simplified any real world religions either.

But yes we could awnser everything with it. The Allesian Order certainly tried:

These sentiments led to an increasingly abstract and unknowable depiction of a Single God. The Alessians were wise enough to realize that they had to incorporate the ancient polytheistic elements into their new religion for it to find a wide acceptance. The divine aspects worshipped by the various humans and Aldmeri were recognizable in the guise of the myriad saints and spirits of the evolving Alessian canon. - http://www.imperial-library.info/content/pocket-guide-empire-first-edition-cyrodiil

It's interesting to read the full side bar btw. The difficulty lies not in the realisation that all one, but rather to maintain that awareness without losing your own identity.


Don't know about your theory, it's just another narrative. The point is not in explaining the narrative (unless it's not clear) but rather to explain why there is more then one.

So you are of the belief that there is no single truth in TES. There is no correct Akatosh in that Alduin, Auri-el, Ruptga, and Alkosh are all autonomous beings, so Auri-el and Alduin could meet and have a conversation with each other.

You could say that I'm stuck in the mundane, single-truth mindset, and I think that there is one Akatosh that is seen differently through different cultural lenses. I feel like there is a single narrative that actually happened, and only through examining all the different cultural interpretations of that narrative and taking the bits of overlap we can weave it all together to find out the truth.

The reason there are multiple narratives is there are multiple cultures who obviously see things differently. If by making a myth a culture creates a god, whose to say that a person can't invent a god thus willing it into existence. If everyone on Nirn suddenly forgot that gods existed I don't think the gods would cease to exist. If that were the case, the lent-bones would cease to exist as well, and since the gods are all part of the Godhead, the godhead would cease to exist as well. What if one person decided the gods weren't real? Would a single person's worth of god-material vanish? And what of the Dwemer who believed the gods weren't even gods?

In addition what of the creation feedback that exists when mortals on Nirn use myths to give power to gods and create their own?

Godhead splits and fractures into multiple gods > Aedra create Nirn > mortals on Nirn create gods [feedback]. That's an infinite creation loop that could only be pinched off at the end of a kalpa. If such a model was real, the whole of the Aurbis would look like the image through a kaleidoscope while underwater and dizzy.

So I'm of the realistic school, the mundane school call it boring, but I like to have truth with my toast in the morning.

It'd probably be a Nordic song but yeah.


As posted in the other thread. Lies on death bones.


Now you have to explain two things.

Why are there multiple cultures? By all appearances there was no time after the dawn to break apart, They started cultured and divided straight out of the gate as if it was a new age of empires game.

Why do they all believe roughly the same? While they do believe different things, the roles haven't all change that much and remain consistent. There hardly is a god that can't be found in another culture.


It is nothing but the consequence of having real gods.

The Dawn was the end of the last kalpa, yes? The ends and beginnings are blurry, and Time was not fully structured yet. I believe that time enough existed for the races to move about, and the lack of historians from the Dawn would suggest this as well.

Because they all have the same origin, and because all cultural thought is metagenetic memory passed down from their creators, it's natural that they should all have the same rough shapes of gods in their minds which were morphed by culture.

Sheogorath always wins. Not even Akatosh can escape.

What about the deadric princes? Where do they fall in to place?

Yes, Alduin might certainly speak to Auri-el. The primary attribute that characterizes aedra, whether they're gods, mer, men, etc. is that they're magicka/creatia/anu-stuff subject to the division of padomay/PSJJJJ. Bits of it can be an aedroth on Nirn, experience a unique perspective and communicate with other such bits. What separates gods from mortals is that they are not limited to one life or story. Lesser aedroth are creatures of a local physical body that takes a singular path through time and consequence. The Aedra/Aedroth that is the earth-bones is not limited to singularity, locality, or even contradictory exclusion--If it can be 8/9 divines all at the same time it can certainly be multiple versions of each of them simultaneously as well. What mythopeia does is help define those distinctions and interactions. The overlaps in the narratives are important, but not to the exclusion of the importance of their differences and unique distinctions.


The earth-bones are HUGE. They're everything. They're Lorkhan's Corpse and Nirn and all the Planets. They're everything and everyone and every god. They are the ontological reality of Mundus. Every god-story that achieves any sort of notoriety and relevance will align to them. It's very important to remember that Nirn is a world where the physics are made out of magick and that stories about gods have real power. That's the whole bit that makes mantling different from incarnation. Incarnation is when a god (story about the earth-bones) has enough personality and power to walk among mortals with an avatar. This is great for helping to make new stories and alter cultural interpretations; mythopeia is a two-way street on Nirn. Mantling is when you re-create the narrative elements that define the personality of a god in your own life, at least in the popular perception. Once you've done that, the story of what you do next becomes a new story about the god by default. These can be combined, and that's what passes for politics at some level.


The reality of magick on Nirn isn't dependent upon mortal belief for its existence, only its shape. A lot of what you believe about how much the lent-bones depend upon the support of the gods might depend on what you believe about Talos, but the Godhead definitely does not rely on the Aurbis for its ontological support--that is strictly a one-way relationship. The godhead derives its teleological support from the AE, which is the most essential point when you get right down to it.

One facet of the discussion here is that Nirn is a world with demonstrable gods. One person's disbelief isn't going to have an impact, and Nirn has a net magick surplus, what with all the stuff flowing in from the sun and the stars and trafficked through Daedric channels. And what of the Dwemer? Perhaps you should ask them about the ultimate consequences of their theology.


The god-shapes formed by mythopeia exist within the context of the Mundus and the power of the earth-bones. You don't get new sub-munduses every time a new god-concept rises or an existing god-concept gets modified. Well, not necessarily. There are certainly ontological disruptions associated with radical alterations to the gods. However, it seems that the next sub-gradient "down" from the Mundus has to do with CHIM, which I am not at all prepared to address.


This perspective doesn't work external to the Mundus. The limit of Lorkhan is what reduces the Mundus to a single truth. Outside or before this, the Aurbis is a realm of infinite potential. Every metaphor for creation is present in the Dawn.

Don't despair, though; the abstractions that these metaphors point to (truth?) are also present in the Dawn. Aka's crazy because his shadow took a peek outside the Aurbis, and saw (among other things) the infinite isolation and imprisonment of the Godhead. Lorkhan is Aka's knowledge that the Aurbis does not have meaning imposed from without, and worse, that it doesn't generate any of its own from within. Everything exists as raw possibility, but nothing happens and nothing matters. Lorkhan wouldn't let Aka forget that he was the Godhead, so he Zero-Summed.