Hey everybody, thanks for listening to the Elder Lore podcast. And for our episode today, we are actually going to be going all the way back, all the way back to the very beginning, and we will be discussing the different creation myths, the different cultures and different religions believe in, and how that has kind of shaped their cultures and also shaped the universe itself. We're going to talk a little bit about myth, well, we're actually going to talk a lot about myth, and then we're going to talk a little bit about the astronomy or the cosmology of the Elder Scrolls universe. But, as I said, in order to begin, we must go all the way back to the very beginning.
The least complicated version of events when we're talking about the creation of Mundus, Mundus being the name with which we refer to the mortal plane. The least complicated version of events you can find in what's called the Anuit. You can find it as either the Anuit power-phrased, there's also a copy of it called A Children's Anuit, and it is basically the children's folktale version of the creation myth. According to the Anuit, the first beings were Anu and Padame, who were brothers.
They both came into the void, and upon entering into it, time began, time with an uppercase T. Traditionally, Anu is seen as a being of pure light, and Padame is kind of his opposite of being of pure darkness, and in the space between them where the light and the dark mixed was made Nur. Nur, which is spelled N-I-R, was beautiful to behold, and both brothers instantly fell in love with her, but she loved only Anu, which caused Padame to flee from both of them in bitterness. It was not long before Nur became pregnant, and upon hearing this, Padame returns in anger.
He beats her within inches of her life before Anu is able to come to her rescue. The brothers grapple until Anu is able to overwhelm and expel Padame. Nur soon gives birth to creation, but soon after the birthing, she succumbs to her wounds and dies. Anu then retreats into the sun to grieve.
So the creation that she gave birth to is really a collection of 12 worlds. And these 12 worlds flourish for a while until eventually Padame returns once again to exact his revenge. He uses a blade to tear the world apart, attempting to destroy all that Anu and Nur had together created new returns, and fights his brother one last time, and the two are locked in combat until Anu can once again exile his brother outside of time. Anu returns and beholds the destruction of the 12 worlds and labors to forge them, forge from them a new world from the scattered remainders of the 12 that had previously existed.
He is at long last successful. The pieces of the 12 worlds, complete with all of the life forms that individually inhabited them, are reforged into one world, which is called Nurd. It is at this moment that Anu beholds his world, made Anu, Padame surprises Anu, and stabs him through. Anu had thought after the last time that he expelled his brother that he had actually killed him, but this was not true, and Padame returns and is able to surprise his brother, and they turn on each other once more and grapple until they actually end up pulling each other outside of time forever.
And there they will remain kind of locked in this never ending battle with each other. According to the Anuad, the blood of Padame becomes the Daedra, the blood of Anu becomes the stars, and where their two bloods mingled together became the Aedra. This explains the Aedra's capacity for both good and ill, in addition to explaining their vested interest in the doings of the mortals Anu. So the Temple Zero Society has made a study of the various creation myths Anuern, and they present them all to you in a very convenient book called the Monomyth, find it in the games.
They take a special interest in where the beliefs diverge between man and mare, but also between the different races of the Els. And how those differences explain those differences in culture. So, while some of the myths, as I said, do diverge from each other, all religions and Tamriel begin with the same concept, and that concept is the duality of the order of Anu and the chaos of Padame, which go by many different names. You can also find references to them as Anuiel and Sithis, Aak and El, Satak and Aakal.
Etymologically speaking, their names are pretty similar, but the different cultures have throughout the ages come up with different names for them. So, in between these two Anu and Padame is made Nern, which is Elnifex for the great maybe. So it's not actually a world, it's more of like a void that has within it the potential to sustain life. So, in most Tamrielic religions, it is not Anu who was held in the highest praise, it is actually Padame because most cultures believe that it was Padame that causes the initial reaction that would eventually lead to the making of creation.
I like to think of it as some kind of science experiment, and the disclaimer here of course is that I'm not a science teacher, but to me, Anu represents the kind of perfect stasis and equilibrium in which nothing new comes or goes. Padame on the other hand represents chaos and energy that forces molecules to collide with each other and spontaneously create matter. But in any case, from these two at Aata, which roughly translates to original spirits, are made the gods and the quote unquote demons, which refers to the Adra and the Daedra. There are two other pieces that remain common to all other religions other than Anu and Padame, and this is the concept of the Dragon God and the Missing God.
The Dragon God is almost always associated with time, commonly known as Akatosh. The Missing God is a concept that relates more personally to the mortal plane as it is usually the deity that took the largest part into creation of it, and is referred to as the Missing God because of either just an absolute absence from the Pantheon as in Lorcan being left out of the Nine Divines, or the removal of his Divine Spark. At this point, it's important to say that the mortal plane does not exist yet. The Grey maybe, as I said, is just a void with the potential for life within which the original spirits still have free reign.
The Monomith reads, quote, when Akatosh forms, time begins, and it becomes easier for some spirits to realize themselves as beings with a past and a future. The strongest of the recognizable spirits crystallize, Mephala, Arkay, Ifre, Magnus, Rupthya, etc. Others remain as concepts, ideas, or emotions. It is at this time, end quote, it is at this time that Lorcan, who is the so-called Trickster God, details a plan to create the mortal plane.
Most humans see this as a mercy. This is the Gods giving mortals a chance to attain immortality. One of the things that Michael Kirkbride has said about the Elder Scrolls universe is that every single one of the games and everything, basically the drive that motivates everybody within the Elder Scrolls universe has to do with this idea of moving beyond mortality and into divinity, into godhood, and into kind of enlightenment. So, the humans believe that this was the Gods giving mortals a chance to attain their immortality, to attain their godhood.
The elves on the other hand believe that this was nothing but cruelty. They believe that they are descendent from the Gods, whereas the humans believe they were created by the Gods, and that this event permanently sundered them from their divine ancestors forever. In other words, the elves believed that they were already divine, and it was when Lorcan tricked the original spirits into creating Mundus, into creating the realm of existence, that the elves were forever taken away from their divine core. So, this is where the discussion becomes less about the creation, and more about Lorcan himself.
The different cultures and religions have different outlooks on Lorcan, different names and different opinions, and I'm going to do my best to explain them to you now. If anything here doesn't make sense to you or you become interested in and would like to find out more about on your own, I am paraphrasing all of this from the Monomid. So, if you can find it in any, in the Elderscrolls games, I'm not sure if it's present in Skyrim, and you can read it online at any rate. That would be the place to find out.
So, first comes the myth of Arubus. These are paraphrased from texts supposedly written by the Sijics, two Emperor V, in an attempt to explain to him the religion of the Aldmer. According to these texts, the Arubus refers to the Grey maybe, that space in which the light of Anu and the shadow of Padme mixed, and this void that has the potential for life. So, the Aldmer believed that it was the death of the magical beings of Arubus that gave birth to Mundus.
In some accounts, this was a self-motivated sacrifice in which new beings were made and grew from the rot and decay of their dead progenitors. Other accounts have it as a war, in which the slaughtered bodies of the beings become kind of the substance of the world. It is at this point also that the Deidra are born being more closely attuned to the realm of Blibian, or the realm of Padme, than the mortal plane. But in any case, the agent of the sacrifice is lurking, and the Aldmer viewed this, as I said, as a painful and forced separation from their true potential.
So, the Altmeri creation myth, the High Elf and creation myth, departs from this one on some points. The High Elves maintain that some of the Eta, some of the original spirits escaped from their death. Some decided to transform themselves. Magnus, who is the God of Magic, is one of those original spirits that managed to escape.
The Eta that decided to transform themselves would eventually become the El Novei, the ancestors of all men and mare. Lorcan recruited some of the weakest, spirited El Novei into his own army, and these would eventually become men. Lorcan's army marched against the other El Novei until Trenimak, who is Ariel's muscle, and also the precursor to Malakat. Ariel, I should say, is the High Elven name for Akitash.
So, Trenimak confronts Lorcan in battle, and tears his heart out with his bare hands. So, Ariel and Trenimak get together in an attempt to destroy Lorcan's heart, but according to myth, the heart laughs at them and says, This heart is the heart of the world, for one was made to satisfy the other. So, because they cannot destroy the heart, Ariel fastens the heart to his bow and fires it off into space. And as we heard in the previous episode, this is how it will eventually land in Dwemerath, which would later be known as Rhysdane, which would later be known as Marwen, and it would form the Great Volcano Red Mountain.
So, the Red Guards, who live in Hammerfell, originally came from the island continent of Yokuta, which is far to the west. In their creation myth, there is only Satak and Akhel, Satak being the world's skin, and Akhel being working. The Red Guards believed that, in the beginning, there was only Satak, who was this great serpent that was kind of coiled around itself, and it was coiled so tight that there was no room for the world's to breathe or move. And that is, until Akhel makes himself known.
And Akhel is, this might sound strange, but as far as I understand it, Akhel is basically Satak's stomach. And so Akhel becomes this great hunger that forms from within Satak, and it causes Satak to eat and eat without end. Of course, soon there's nothing left for Satak to eat, and so Akhel convinces Satak to eat his own heart. And this is how Satak dies, sheds his skin, and basically the whole cycle starts over again.
There's a lot more involved with the Yukudan Creation Myth, and again, if this piqued your interest, read it in the monomit. But this is really enough for our purposes. We can see the similarities in the way these cultures view Lorkin. Next is the Siridils.
In their myth, Lorkin is known as Shazar. Shazar convinces the Aedra to make the world after talking beautifully to them about motherhood and fatherhood, and having a responsibility for lower life forms. There's less conniving involved, and more really just convincing. So Lorkin convinces the Aedra.
The Aedra freely give birth to the world, but of course the birthing is very painful, and afterwards the Aedra find themselves much less powerful than they were before. Upon hearing the Aedra complain about how little power they have now, the Aedra begin mocking them, they call them weak, for detaching themselves from their creation and taking no part in it. And this is how the Daedric Lords come to the decision to make their own realms within themselves, which are of course the Daedric realms of oblivion. So, in a nutshell, those are the not really so wide-ranging beliefs of how the Mortal Realm came about.
So what we have to talk about now is what exactly is the Mortal Realm. And in order to have that discussion, we need to first talk about cosmology. So this information too comes from the Temple Zero Society. We know that there are eight planets in the universe, not including Nern.
We can see them, there's two oraries you can visit in different Elder Scrolls games. In Red Guard, from the Elder Scrolls Adventures series, there's an orary you can visit. And there's also one in the game oblivion, although you need to install a plug into access. It's within the arcane university in the Imperial city.
So, according to the Temple Zero Society, the planets are not actually planets at all. The planets represent the planes of the gods, infinite spaces nested within the infinity of the plane of oblivion. So, because these are infinite spaces in themselves, within a greater infinite space, the Mortal Mind perceives them as a spherical, whereas they really have no mass and don't really begin or end. So, the planets are not really planets at all.
They're really these other realms of existence that the mind perceives as planets. So, the eight planets represent the Eight Debines. Nern represents the mortal plane, which Lord Dinn can I have into creation. Outer Space, in other words, the night sky is basically the infinite realm of oblivion, which is marked with these very small holes into Etherius beyond.
Etherius is the realm of Magnus, who's the god of magic, and as so, it's a realm of basically pure magical energy constantly in flux. So, the holes to Etherius are the stars. And the largest star, which is known as Magnus, is actually the Sun, which is really just a huge hole in the realm of oblivion that leads to the realm of pure magic behind it, which Etherius, as you can begin to visualize, encompasses everything. So, if the night sky represents oblivion, in other words, if you're walking around skyroom at night and you look up and you see the moons and you see the stars and you see the dark night, you're actually looking at the realm of oblivion and you're looking at the holes in the realm of oblivion that lead to the realm of magic behind it.
If that's oblivion, the day sky represents the realm of Etherius, where slight variance in colors and shades, in reality, are constantly shifting magical energies that remain constantly in flux because they are intrinsically aligned to the elements. So, as elemental balances shift, the day sky begins to change color. Alright, so that's it. It's very interesting to think about this kind of stuff, but it's quite difficult to actually talk about it.
So, if you've heard anything that, of course, you think isn't correct or you think he's a little bit of clarification, let me know. Is it the blog? elderlord.wordpress.com? And I hope you tune in next time.
Alright, thanks for listening.