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Bakker XLVI: Make Eärwa Great Again


Rhom

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1 hour ago, Rhom said:

Doesn't is say something in that scene about the child chipping away his fortune or something that would imply he would be selling the salt?

IIRC the fortune referred to a chorae the boy had found. Chorae are rare and definitely worth a fortune.

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I have the books in front of me and some time, so I looked it up (the very end of chapter 16 in TTT for those curious, pp 390-391 in my copy). No mention of a chorae at all, actually. But there is this line:

Too numb to be terrified, the young boy nodded, clutched tight the salt that would be his fortune.

So it would seem as if he was collecting salt to sell when he ran afoul of the Consult, where I'm sure he was used to satisfy various violent lusts. Definitely no indication he was anything other than a brief, one-shot character.

 

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54 minutes ago, Let's Get Kraken said:

That was my impression as well. Just because a street urchin considers it a fortune, doesn't necessarily make it all that comparatively valuable.

Although otherwise I'm not sure why the scene was there. It seems strange that there wouldn't be something important happening.

Well, in our world there have been times and places when salt was literally worth it's weight in gold, so it may have been a genuine fortune as well.

That scene does seem a little out of place. I think maybe it's just there as a "Hey guys, remember the Consult? They're still out the Consulting! Stay tuned for the second trilogy quartet!" from RSB. Other than that, I've got nothing.

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I've thrown out the idea that it was chanv though this is hardly confirmed, and there's definitely been some disagreement about this in the threads.

Consider that we know that the ashes of a Quya is a narcotic.  Maybe there's a distinction in mechanism between ashes and "salted" sorcerers though?

The other particular thing in the scene is that Aurang-as-synthese addresses the boy and says something like "Want to know a secret?" and the scene ends.  Curious.  

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20 minutes ago, Let's Get Kraken said:

If chanv really is the salted remains of human sorcerers, then that just makes Iyokus even creepier than he already was.

But you probably wouldn't put it past him, would you?  

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1 hour ago, Triskan said:

But you probably wouldn't put it past him, would you?  

H, has a theory after we found out that wherever the main supply of Chanv comes (I forget the name of the place), there is also a ruined Mansion there. That they mine the ashes of the Nonmen from the Mansion. He has a theory on it and could it explain it much better than I.

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If chanv is the salted remains of sorceror I will stop reading these books.  Bakker's probably got a contract with the salt lobbyists that have plagued this world for years. Stick to a low sodium diet unless you can pull a heart from your butt.

 

Otherwise, I am a huge fan of MattB's use of 'Consulting', and plan to use it to describe all actions of the Consult.  I pronounce it in my head with the accent on the first syllable.

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1 hour ago, Michael Seswatha Jordan said:

H, has a theory after we found out that wherever the main supply of Chanv comes (I forget the name of the place), there is also a ruined Mansion there. That they mine the ashes of the Nonmen from the Mansion. He has a theory on it and could it explain it much better than I.

Is it near Golgoterath? It'd be so bad ass if the nonmen were turned to ash by the Arc falls fiery blast and that becomes Chanv!

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On 2/2/2017 at 0:10 PM, .H. said:

 Moe even admits that his own probability trances failed him at a point (although that was later) and that the Thousandfold Thought "came to him" not him to it.  In this way, I think the Thought has been the "prime mover" of Kellhus the whole time, conditioning his whole journey (and Moënghus' too).

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22 minutes ago, lokisnow said:
On 2/2/2017 at 0:10 PM, .H. said:

 Moe even admits that his own probability trances failed him at a point (although that was later) and that the Thousandfold Thought "came to him" not him to it.  In this way, I think the Thought has been the "prime mover" of Kellhus the whole time, conditioning his whole journey (and Moënghus' too).

Would like to point out that this made me think about how Koringhus' "Zero" and "The ThousandFold Thought" are nominally in rhetorical opposition to one another and this is probably very important.

I for one think the visions in both TWP and TGO of "kellhus" are not visions of kellhus, not even future kellhus recursively disrupting time, but are of Koringhus, doing what Inrau did in TDTCB ("calling out from the dark" after he died) but with far greater skill and agency. 

Which begs the question of how Inrau and Koringhus are similar.

Regarding why Moenghus never realized the objectivity of damnation, he (presumably) always believed it to be a mass delusion, much as most people on earth don't believe in burning in hell for eternity for telling a white lie when you're two years old, despite that being, you know, what most religions posit, that living is an inherently sinful existence and can only be mediated through the religion interceding on your behalf so you're not damned to burn in hell for all eternity because one time you put on your left shoe first instead of your right shoe first and that is unorthodox and a sin and therefore you're damned.  Moenghus always adhered to the dunyain beliefs of being above it all, whereas both Kellhus and Koringhus were broken by extended physical and psychological trauma.

***

random sidebar: does Koringhus killing 99 of 100 birds with stones foreshadow him killing 99 of 100 gods once he joins with zero?

***

 

 

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something I've been wanting to post for a week or two:

Connect the dots between the Amiolas (the black cauldron on sorweel's head) and Nil'Giccis+Gin'Yursis and THERE-IS-A-HEAD-ON-A-POLE-BEHIND-YOU

Because in a quite literal way, the black cauldron is a head on a pole behind Sorweel.

Everyone says that Sorweel dons the visage of Immiriccas, literally the shade of the dead nonman whose soul is bound to the black cauldron--the Amiolas

GinYursis soul, like Immiriccas' soul, is bound to an object: the great seal.  Sidebar: the great seal manifests at the location in cil Aujis which joins the Starving Sky and the Holy Deep. Is it a seal meant to hold a gate at the endless stair.

Now, and this is crucial:

Nil'Giccas willingly dons the shade of Ginyursis in an extremely close approximation of the Amiolas. The face of GinYursis is visible on top of the face of Nil Giccas.

NilGiccas then proceeds to have a conversation with GinYursis, or channel GinYursis' thoughts in a way the presumably mute shade was otherwise unable to do. Since Nil Giccas willingly dons the shade, he presumably does this to gather intelligence.

Note that The scalpers flee at this point in terror but NilGiccas does not attack them, and offscreen separates from his Amiolas when Ginyursis returns to the seal after Akka trys to block Nil Giccas from accompanying them. Note that in the book which follows this, Nil Giccas begins to give sermons that remind Akka of Kelhus, so although Cleric never once gave a sermon in The Judging Eye to merit his foreshadowing name, in the White Luck Warrior he gives nonstop sermons and the major intervening event that may have affected Cleric's outlook on life (as Sorweel's outlook was changed) was in donning the soul of Gin Yursis for a while.

So? let's look at how the amiolas occurs in the judging eye

Quote

The Holy Veteran turns his bearded profile to them, nothing more. “He has this!”

But Cleric has lowered his head. Lines of reflected white hook across the contours of his skull. Trailing tendrils of smoke-darkness, the Nonman King steps around him, strides with sandals that do not quite touch ground, then turns so that he stands above Cleric’s armoured back.

Where Cleric holds his head bowed, the spectre raises his dead face to the ceiling, as though seeing sky rather the crushing miles of earth. The mouth works in unheard benediction. The rigid arms lift and rotate forward. The elbows fold. The hands, with fingers and thumbs held tight as though in some ritual pose, close about Cleric’s shoulders. The scalpers watch their companion raised, a silvery figure framed by a corona of black …

 The Nonman King holds Cleric like a doll before him, like a cup he can spill. He steps forward— into … A violent spasm, like drawing first breath. Limbs fling outward, snap rigid, like ropes weighted with lead. Cleric’s whole body arches backward, as if bound across the curves of drawn bows. And both Nonmen can be seen, as though each were solid and the other were glass, naked limbs within armour, nimil plates beneath a gown of chained gold. The Nonman King’s face pulls forward, twists in bewildered delirium. Wrath. For an instant, the company glimpses a floating seal, a savage emblem of hell …

Cleric drifts toward the abject scalpers, floating in a vertical pool of black, like tar spilled across unseen waters, his face submerged, his limbs drowned, beneath the hoary aspect of the Nonman King.

So: now we want to pay ESPECIALLY close attention to what GinYursis says:
 

Quote

“I dream that I am a God.”

There is a head on a pole behind you, eh?

Quote

“I dream that I am a God.”

But a hunger, A hunger runs through me … splits me like rotted stone.

How, could a God hunger?

The Gates are no longer guarded.

so, uh, GinYursis via the Amiolas says precisely four lines and they foreshadow and concur with the crucial "revelation" of The Great Ordeal of the "head on a pole behind you" scene that reveals the world is a granary and humans are the bread.

Hold that thought though, because, speaking of granary:

Quote

rise into shadow about them, the bronze-barred cages lined like pupae across them— as before. But each encases a mad thrashing, arms reaching, hands clutching, mouths shrieking, a thousand moments of anguish, a thousand souls, condensed into a mad, smoking blur. Eyes stacked upon eyes, drawn across eyes. The arcs of teeth, a shining multitude. Swatches of welted skin. The Emwama scream, thousands upon thousands of them, forever buried, forever sealed from their native sun. An age of torment compressed into a single wail …

A GRANARY!

(also: sidebar, Mimara sees this with the judging eye: "eyes stacked upon eyes," in other words, when seeing "time" with the judging eye, she sees something akin to the art that nonmen work with their stacking of sculpture. This suggests the nonmen have something approximating the judging eye as a common species characteristic

But, picking up where I left off. 

THAT CHAMBER IS A FUCKING GRANARY FOR THE GODS!

it is followed by what insight from Mimara?

Quote

The damned call out to them, wailing with the hunger that knots and strangles and sustains all misery … Yearning to see itself visited upon others.

Damnation loves company hmm?

But, back to this central point

THAT CHAMBER IS A FUCKING GRANARY FOR THE GODS!

And why would the Nonmen be so upset about the gates being unguarded?

Because they lured the gods out of the starving sky and imprisoned them in the holy deep and kept them fed from those granary's.

Oblivion is not a concept for the nonmen, oblivion is what they did to the gods, they lured them into a trap and kept them there. this was how they beat damnation.

This was why the Inchoroi arrived at Earwa because the Nonmen had already beaten damnation.

If we take the latter context of GinYursis talking about gods and gods hungering for damnation, let us reverse and look at the first things GinYursis says in this conversation, now that we know the context of the conversation is Gods and Damnation and what nonmen think of it:

Quote

“They called us false.”

“They are children who can never grow,” Cleric replies. “They could do no different.”

“I loved them. I loved them so much.”

“So did we all, at one time.”

“They betrayed.”

“They betrayed. You betrayed. I am lost. All the doors are different, and the thresholds... they are holy no more.”

“Yes. Our age has passed. Cil-Aujas is fallen. Fallen into darkness.”

“No. Not darkness …Hell.”

“Damnation, Cousin. How? How could we forget?”

They had beaten damnation and they forgot why and how bad it was, in a way, in providing the granary to save their own souls they became the things they feared most, and they fell in love with their god prisoners, gods are children who never grow, locked in their out-of-time stasis and hunger. But the gods wanted out, the gods betrayed them. The gods escaped. The gates were unguarded.

presumably, the gods escaped when the inchoroi crashed an invincible space ship into the vicinity of some gods imprisoned at Viri, thus resulting in Viri being attacked by nonmen outraged that some gods had been released. This is why the inchoroi crashed their ship rather than landing it. they had to break open the holy deep to the starving sky.

and speaking of Douglas Hoftstadter, the previously mentionedmeme author who so impressed young Bakker (whose MIND wasBLOWN by the concept of the power of being a writer of meme's) consider what the inchoroi (or the gods) did to humans in order to finally eradicate the nonmen:

Quote

O’ Ishoriöl, would a different doom have followed? Would the World have turned otherwise had the Mansions of your kin listened? For the Vile had come unto Men in the wilds of Eänna, delivered the very ministry your Sons had so urgently argued. The Vile had sat upon the earth to carve joints with the absurd Prophets of Men, whispered deceit in the guise of secrets, wove the thread of their wicked design into the fabric of their custom and belief. The Vile, not the Exalted, had shown them how to make inscription of speech, and so had chiselled alien malice upon the heart of an entire Race. 

there you have it, chiseling a meme into the heart of a race. Douglas Hoftstadter

also "the exalted?" is that a term for the nonmen? or a term for their god prisoners? Humans claim the gods came to them and gave them the tusk (would make sense if they'd recently been freed) and the nonmen would have a vested interest in believing their precious beloved "exalted" would not betray them and call them false, chiseling a meme into the hearts of mankind.

but the exalted did just that.

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spinning this just a bit further: Well of the aborted. if the inchoroi are worried about damnation, do they abort every conception because this is the only way to save the souls of their children from damnation? Or is this what the nonmen did and or continue to do? After the gods escaped they started killing their women and children to save them from damnation?

Are the inchoroi worried about damnation? their race is already eradicated, they can only save two souls, presumably, Aurax and Aurang, or do they think that damnation has a natural place within the fabric of the universe and should not be interfered with.

did they join the Consult and are cooperating with human attempts to realize the no-god and therefore close the world to the outside because it would then protect the gods from ever being trapped again, since Earwa is the only world such a thing could happen in?

Did Mekeritrig raise his wall, "such a wall I have raised!" to feed the gods?

how does the endless hunger of the gods tie in with the nonman name for the No-god "the angel of endless hunger"?\

 

 

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11 hours ago, larrytheimp said:

Otherwise, I am a huge fan of MattB's use of 'Consulting', and plan to use it to describe all actions of the Consult.  I pronounce it in my head with the accent on the first syllable.

 

11 minutes ago, Let's Get Kraken said:

I'm ducking out of here again until I finish TGO, but first I have to say I concur with larrytheimp on MattB's use of "Consult" as a verb, and will henceforth also be using it at every possible opportunity.

Use it in good health, guys! Or at least with nominal amounts of black semen! B)

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@lokisnow, great post. One problem I have is with Kor being the behind the TT. Directing Kellhus's visions. It, to me, seemed as if finding zero and absolved from damnation, he found peace. I mean, that 100th stone was representative of Love. I think Zero was his way to peace, not worrying about burning the fields.

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11 hours ago, Michael Seswatha Jordan said:

@lokisnow, great post. One problem I have is with Kor being the behind the TT. Directing Kellhus's visions. It, to me, seemed as if finding zero and absolved from damnation, he found peace. I mean, that 100th stone was representative of Love. I think Zero was his way to peace, not worrying about burning the fields.

If you strike me down I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.

im fine with your take, I'm mostly concerned with the rhetorical opposition of "zero" & "thousandfold" by grandson and grand sore respectively, we literally have the two of them come to opposite conclusions.

However if TTT came to Moe and moe just assumed it was complex because The Probability trance investigates complexity, that he found zero but was cognitively incapable of grasping the most important concept of (soul) math so to speak, that would be... ironic.

and koringhus seems to think the dunyain have been trying to "do math" without having a functional concept of zero, which means they're functionally going to always fail.

7 hours ago, Triskan said:

That was some very thought-provoking stuff in those two long posts.  But I worry that it's too clever and nothing so elaborate will turn up.  Kind of like your Moe-was-behind-it-all theory that I so wanted to be true but now fear is not.

All my extrapolations are Totally bullshit on the nonmen+gods stuff.

i completely stand by the connection of amiolas as a cipher to nil giccas and gin yursis though as well as the God hunger dialog being direct foreshadowing of the head on the pole behind you revelations. That analysis is rooted in the text and consistent with layers of revelation stylistics of the series.

The granary of emwamma assertion is almost throwing shade at the world building,as Bakker never really consider the daily logistical cost of requiring millions of slaves to expend energy climbing up elevation to reside in cells out of Lacan's panopticon prison. But it does resemble a grain silo, so my brain leapt to the conclusion that there was a logical world building reasons to storing labor resource like Grain, that there was a world building reason to tormenting them in a worldly approximation of damnation. But I'm probably wrong and it's just a hat tip to a philosophy text, not a soul granary.

ON THE OTHER HAND, what does nil cijaris do, he apes godly behavior from kellhus dreams, and nbathes himself and concsumes the rendered essence of emwamma, as though he were trying to be a god like buffalo bill was trying to be a woman in silence of the lambs. So there seems to be possible evidence for the nonmen picking up behaviors and practices from close observation of the gods.

also I wanted an alternative explanation for the subject of the "they betrayed-ed"  conversation.

 

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