So, Dunmer do ancestor worship. But why, when the soul gets reused? It's kinda like that, right? In other words, ancestor worship would be more like worshiping your future self...

(sorry, my thoughts are also a little incoherent)

i dono, but that sounds damn good in my mind.

elaborating, perhaps:

the dawn was not creation because it did not create. everything was already around but recycled, and at the beginning of the new kalpa it reformed and began to take its new shape. a ball of clay, fresh and malleable. slowly large sections are pushed and pulled into a vague form resembling structure, then modified and modified again until we receive that which is now known as nirn. certain mechanisms keep it stable. as time unfolds the clay collapses onto itself and looses form and structure, returning to the ball. what is added? different colors? any type of playdoh you mix will end up Gray. kalpas: lather, rinse, repeat.

(and you thought your thoughts were incoherent )

What began as nothing was not nothing,
but shapeless shadows cast out into dreams,
two beating hearts, the flesh that renders spirit,
and in the newly-awakened morning-dusk
became the hands of angels
building demons out of paper.
We will wage wars with wooden swords
and say that we slay dragons
though the dragons slay themselves.

Where were want and need before the world?
When gods are born, who tells their bedtime-stories
and teaches them to fear the wolf, and love the handsome prince,
and form darkness into stars, then into planets,
then collide in triumph and create mankind,
Elfkind and others, sloadkind, sea-kin and all,
and swaddle them in fields of fertile soil,
fruit trees, beasts slow and swift for hunting,
and the things that roar at night?
Who teaches gods to fight?
Who gives them greed, or love, or mercy,
and inspires them to dance?

We are children spinning wheels inside of wheels,
we are the gods who name ourselves.
The Dawn ended when the daylight came and the world lived,
little voices in the gods' own little boxes, pets, toys,
and all the Day is spent in games and riddles
until we come to dusk again, the legend-shadows creeping longer
as the gods lie down to sleep soon touch the boxes
and the little pets see nightfall
and find written in the starlight
how to build another world.

Evolution. Kalpa. CREATION is the embodiment, translation, and reembodiment
of the bedtime-stories told to us
by our gods.

Soon they will be the gods who name themselves.

The Chicken layed the egg after the egg was [un]created by Akatosh.

Hmm... you may be onto something there. Dragons also lay eggs...

Dragons are also serpents, if you squint your eyes.

Awesome, so the plot for TES5 will have something to do with recycling of time? Cool.
Most interesting. I like this 'snake biting its own tail' thing. More CHIMified PCs that either save the world from total desolation and destruction OR reset it back to the begining stages. Or both?

This thread just makes me salivate more over the wrest of the Aldadugga stories. Oh boy, I can't wait!

Nocturnal creatures might view Dawn as an end rather than a beginning.

Or something like http://search.japantimes.co.jp/mail/nn20081102a3.html.

Heh, all this is way over my head.

This is the first thing that came to mind, and it reminded me of some images I kick around in my head from time to time. With Enantiomorph as the blueprint of the universe, the rebel/king relationship is, like MK says, a "waveform." A sine wave of some other function from trigonometry. The function has a period, or the length of time it takes to repeat, and Wierd said something interesting a long time ago, something that I don't remember, another science post where he said that witnessing certain matter relationships can deconstruct them and put them into a compartmentalized form. Like the witness breaks the endless waveform pattern into a world, a level of subgradient that is self-contained except, for the moment when one period of the function connects to its neighbor along the x-axis. Blahdunno.

But if the dawn is just the end of the last kalpa, were our parents greater than us, and their parents greater than them? Or will we coalesce when the dragon eats us, and become a collective divinity again. Lord knows it would account for the massively tangled identities and overlapping attributes of the gods.

Or what if Lorkhan did not fail a Chim? To dwell in the tower is to be a whole world of you, and metaphysics 101 tells us that AE, that the being before Anu and Padomay cannot last. By its very nature it splits. It always seemed to me that to attain Chim is to divide like God and become an Enatiomorph in yourself, with a new set of kalpas spurting out of your chest cavity. Do it again.

My apologies, not RL cultures. Tamrielic cultures.

Hmm, very tired, very interested, lets see how this pans out.
The repetition of ending kalpas reminds me of my daydreams i would have before i got a job.
Lying on my bed, i fantasize about some adventure i would have, usually involving me storming a castle on a giant lizard, dualwielding chiansaws or something, then finally rescuing and having six with my spanish teacher. When i would finish this little day dream, It took time for me to come up with a new adventure to have, and during this time wierd things would pop into my mind. James Bond swinging from a flaming vine into an exploding helicopter. My grandmother dueling Richard the Lionhearted for control of the English Monarchy, my old dog Elmo floating on a sea in a raft made from pizza, that kind of thing. Then, i would eventually come up with a new adventure, only this time the lizard is a corvette, the chainsaws are Desert Eagles, the castle is a Military-Industrial Complex, and my spanish teacher is, well, my spanish teacheer (she's really hot). So maybe each Kalpa is a string of (semi)coherent thoughts, and when these thoughts play themselves out, the Godhead has to come up with a new adventure to entertain it's schitzo self, and the Dawn eras are the muddled periods between each Kalpa/Day Dream?

I'm sure i'm going to come back tomorrow and kick myself. Or maybe i'll be the hero of the Lore Forums. Oh well, i'm going to bed

A Kalpa is the time of a "hub" inside the "wheel." There was a universe, that we know nothing about other than Lorkhan saw it. Anuiel and Padomay created a universe inside that which we call the Aurbis. Lorkhan and Akatosh then created a universe inside the Aurbis which we call the Mundas.

Anuiel and Padomay are the remnants of the kalpa before the dawn kalpa, just as Akatosh and Lorkhan are the remnants from the dawn kalpa in the current one. I think the anologues for this kalpa would be Talos and someone on the elven side, Vivec? The High King of Alinor? who knows. I'll agree that the "new thing" is the next subgradient, which the new Kalpa attempts to create. The Aldudagga's always struck me as a retelling of history, but some of it appeared to be stuff that hasn't happened, perhaps they are retellings of the Dawn.

That's my take.

Looking at what MK actually posted to start and his responses to various ideas: what if it is not fundamentally a circle/cycle but rather a piston?

Circle/cycles may be attached to power other things having said that ...

Because I just keep wondering what happens to all the bits the Leaping Demon King and his accomplice added to the Mundus - do they all snap back to where they started from as if on rubber bands?

BOING! ... and there is a waveform that goes back and forwards

edit
oops - creation - six, etc - if so it is not above your head MR TISSUE BOX - it is somewhere lower down - love is where it finds you :wave:

Wasn't this already implied? All this has happened before and all this will happen again. The end and beginning are one and the same. Mothers birth their daughters who birth their mothers who birth their daughter who birth their mothers. Its Hinduism 101. You need t get original MKULTRA, The Hinduism thing is getting old fast.

What I'm saying is not sure this is about the Wheel of REincarnation/Life Mortazo - I suspect that it has gone off on a tangent with different implications

Not repetition, or not just repetition.

As is your envy and inconstant harrassment. Not to mention the entry-level insight into Hinduism and Satanism wiki wiki wiki wiki. Yes, I like Buck Rogers, too, Mort.

Talk to me when you own a liqour store.

I post this with the disclaimer that I could never really comprehend the metaphysical aspects of lore and really just like to ramble on about random thoughts will trying to form a coherent picture of things:

I like the idea people have been mentioning of the shifting of relationships, with mortals becoming gods and new mortals coming onto the scene. Seems to fit with the things that we know very well.

While, it is my opinion that this is probably not literally true, with souls actually being reused, and I don't think most Dunmer are conscious of it, I actually think this may be very true in a sort of metaphorical sense, related to how events, legends, heroes, archetypes repeat themselves and keep showing up, that circular sense of time, mantling, etc. Due to this, inadvertently, perhaps ancestor worshipers are worshiping their future and past, because they will become or have been what their ancestors are now. With CHIM, worshiping yourself seems to be half if not all of the point, and Vivec did come out of Velothi culture.

Of course, I think I am probably just connecting two unrelated aspects that seem to have a superficial relationship to each other, or I could be entirely wrong-headed.

My aunt Mae owns a liquor store in Oklahoma-- is that good enough?

Between you and me though, I suspect your personal tastes would be better satisfied with a short trip to Mexico. They sell http://lh6.ggpht.com/_u6Sl1RsiiR8/RlHlUzOpDaI/AAAAAAAABk0/Hpksa4NClnQ/Royal+Caribbean+Cruise+to+Bahamas+092.jpgthere. (Jack Daniels too, But I think you would prefer the air of sophistication of the crown.)

I could see Vivec shuffleboarding in the caribbean... Give him a little color.

The answer to this question seems like an obvious "yes" now but, can we start calling the "Twelve Worlds of Creation" the "Twelve Previous Kalpas?"

I think it more apt to call them the 12 folds of the last skin... But I could be mistaken.

Just like a snake that sheds its skin, each time the skins are alike, but at the same time each one is different, and unique.

Hence my 'pedantic' tirade about how the nature of ES time is neither linear, nor circular; Kalpas are not perfect reinactments, but incremental evolutions. (MK himself seems to have verified this later on in the thread. "There is exactly one new thing in each Kalpa" and all that.) Time in the ES universe seems to be more like a very convoluted corkscrew. It DOES eventually return to the same original reference state, or at least, promises to do so eventually. (It may never do so, however, as the length of the corkscrew could be infinite.)

Theoretically, one can therefor change the past, and the very mythic nature of the universe, by changing the future, and holding on to your identity long enough (Infinity). It would however, be only a grand theatre, because if you change the past by altering the future, (which causes the past to exist) you are constricted by causality to perform that act, and it is not choice at all.

Perhaps this is why gods have no free will.


This would also explain how the Selective were able to change the mythic nature of Akatosh.... They altered time's past, by altering its future, and resetting time. The new program propogated up, and through the next kalpa, resetting a new age reference in which what they wanted to accomplish was true. (The new program was ultimately futile, however, because in the long run it accomplished nothing. The very change they wanted to make was precalculated as a consequence of the aurbis's existence.)

Theoretically speaking, if you can imagine it, then it exists in some specific convolution of the ES temporal axis. The dragon broke event of the selective, in which the future and past of tamriel was radically different to each person asked, is just a side effect of time re-adjusting to the injected/infectious change.

The results of a forward temporal injection on the current ordinal's status is impossible for a mortal to calculate, and likely impossible for one of the et'ada to calculate perfectly either. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and subtle changes here, can have drastic effects someplace else.

More specifically, how it will cause the time axis to jump is unpredictable.




Ironically, it has implications in the real world too, if you stay up on theoretical physics involving causality.

Haven't we been here before?

http://www.imperial-library.info/obscure_text/nu-hatta_nu-mantia.shtml#8

There you have a wheel within the Mundus which affects the Aurbis.

The Ayleids are returning. In particular the "masters" of White Gold.



And now here we are speculating. What if the kalpas are wheels within wheels? What if mortals become et'ada in the next kalpa? As if those cogs were not already turning?