The Nine Divines, or is it Eight? | The Elder Scrolls Podcast #51

[Music] what is up ladies and gentlemen welcome back to the elder scrolls podcast i'm scott as always here with michael and drew and today we are talking all about the nine divines or eight divines depending on your political persuasion i suppose but we'll start getting into it but i just want to throw out one sort of parameter we're going to try and keep this a little more grounded in the sort of imperial understanding of the divines so we're not talking about just the age or broadly like we'll bring them up you know other interpretations occasionally to sort of contrast them but we're going to keep it you know talos akatosh rk you know that kind of thing so where do we want to start do we want to start with like the biggest hitters or do we actually want to start with some of the well what about how about starting with some actual law on the divines and how they were created in the first place a little bit of an overview of how obviously we had saint alicia make these divines because she had help with her slave rebellion from the nords but then the needs they had the old old mary pantheon because they just took the pantheon of their overlords and then to kind of like make everyone get on which you know kind of sounds silly when you think about it like i don't think nords would be like happy with any changes but she did get all of the kind of pantheons and blurred into our own one to be honest i actually would say like it's probably even a little bit more human flavored anyway just because it is yeah but but just changing gods in general i i would find strange like there's a there's a line somewhere that's like oh it wasn't exactly the same but it was good enough for the nords i feel like if you if you had like a uh like a if you if you saw it happen i feel like the change would have been a little bit more gradual like for example like very first incarnation of say like you know kinereth like they might be started calling kynareth and so but i feel like it would have been a few like generations of worship where it kind of shifts and changes not like he's instantly okay you know now she's all soft and well that is important context like the idea that initially when founding the religion you've got a bunch of former slaves who kind of somewhat through stockholm syndrome but it's also all they know are used to elven gods but a couple of generations later the grandkids the great grandkids of those former slaves don't really need heavy elven elements in it it's kind of just yeah i guess it's just a way to reconcile everything and then with the nine divines as we see them now their elven elements and even their nordic elements seem very disconnected and i mean if you actually look at the divines too the other thing to consider is maybe the the divines that we know today like the eight divines like in concept were created by alicia but the whole um rising of the elysian order and making that the dominant faith and the eight divine sort of like a component of that might be very different to compared to say like the imperial cult that exists afterward through the riemann empires and septum empires like if you consider in um you know in the real world like look at uh christianity or all abrahamic religions or sowing starting you know i guess it's judaism or whatever ages ago but then you've kind of got like the you know the formation of christianity the formation of islam and then you've got the splits within those you know you've got um you know that sort of anglican and catholic and um orthodox and all eastern orthodox and all of that like you can imagine a similar sort of thing somewhat like that the basically time and different cultures and stuff will have an effect on on the gods even if as a concept the christian god has still been a christian god since jesus like the idea but you know what i mean it is kind of like having a reformation because you know in the early days more so for the nords but you could say so for the elves too is the the worship of these gods is very very um dogmatic and and with the nords it's very animalistic and like these totems that they they revere and when you've got shaw leading the charge who's a very aggressive god who hates the elves um these kind of things needed to be kind of nerfed a bit and like toned down for everyone to live in a cosmopolitan society so it's kind of like a reformation in like getting rid of like you know when you imagine it with christianity and catholicism you kind of had to take away some of the really rigorous strict elements of the religion and make it so that kind of everyone can you know like worship it but it's not not be so like ingrained in every aspect and if you do look at a lot of the divines too they are very like um cosmopolitans are weather we throw around all the time but i mean like it's kind of one size fits all like they're not too restrictive like they're not controversial i guess it's a good way to look at it there's nothing that you hear in the nine divine's teachings that you're like oh my gosh that's that's so crazy and i guess that's why a lot of people don't find them to be the most interesting group of gods compared to other ones like you know you go look at the dunmer pantheon and how they will talk about betrayal and like manipulation and interesting concepts instead of just above all else be good to one another you know yeah it is kind of um utilitarian in a sense it's just good for their society and you can i mean even with the idea of tiber septim being immortalized as talos in their in their pantheon you can kind of tell with the divines that if people worship this this god or this figure then oh whatever just allow it they can be part of the divines it's like if they've got if they've got worshippers then what's wrong with allowing them to be worshipped and venerating them whereas then you get the elves coming in with that they're like you know no this is the way it's done we don't want some human joining the panther and that's you know it's it's heresy and you can see where the divines is kind of just like we're not getting caught up in all that heresy and sacrilege and it's just you know if you want to worship them and it's got a good value on someone so i feel like another reason would have to be besides just different um like so uh muted and not really like they don't have a big cultural persuasion like you know kind or something like that there's a very nordic feeling thing it's just also um early nebanese culture you had all of these like many many different cults and around the time of the elise in order there was heaps of stuff going around the obviously eight divines the imperial cult sort of was one of the more popular ones but you can see how it could it could you know raise itself to a state of popularity because it was very like fits all and wasn't i guess exclusionary except obviously with daedra but that's pretty um standard fair but it's easy to make them exclusionary when you can paint the daedra as these evil crazy like things that to be fair like on a wide scale except in you know the different pantheons around tamriel but in cyrodiil in particular if you go look at the different shrines and the cults and stuff like a lot of them do get kind of screwed over by their daedra overlords like it's not yeah you're not necessarily going into the best deal i mean i find it interesting actually that the needs would even worship the the elven gods in the first place despite the stockholm syndrome like what are they doing but in terms of religion like they're they're constantly being like hurt and i guess but i guess it's the same slaves would believe in um in like rome would believe in roman gods but did they get time did they get time for religion it's just an interesting idea did they have temples did they or were they just kind of praying in shackles and well to add on to what you're what you're getting at there if you you know if you're looking at the say the the religion in somerset you've got auriel lee you know the head of the pantheon and it's very much their culture is based you know this is generally speaking but their culture is based around the idea that they have a connection to auriel and and the high elves are superior and belong back in in the in a furious in the heavens and then even with the nords you've got um kine who breathe the nords um onto the throat of the world and if you're not a nord or if you're not a high elf some of these gods don't really mesh with you personally but if you imagine in cyrodiil say you've got you've got a mishmash of different races all living in cyrodiil and then you think oh you know mara she's the goddess of love compassion the bounty of nature you know everyone cares about their crops being healthy this applies to everyone it's not like no the imperials are superior kind of religion oh yeah yeah the talos as well worship of talos can be useful too because it is like a ambition figure and a kind of like you know transcendence idea putting that into the culture like you can overcome it helps put faith in the emperor as well whoever is the the ruling monarch it's like yeah this is how important they are to our provide more like potential context to the idea of the slaves accepting like the a um the elven gods and so on and because they were just born into it it's also like i guess um looking at slavery kind of different to how we do in the modern world and in our recent history where it was very like economical or like sort of transactional or based on stuff like a lot of ancient ancient slavery was and you know you could even look at uh india and a lot of ancient india and stuff so a good example of this and caste systems and stratification of society the the stratification of society in the place of slaves was kind of something like associated with the religion and the gods itself so they could be looking at auriel and like auriel they worship their god and so on but they kind of feel like they're put they can their place as slaves is ordained by the the gods and it is made so by them like so their relationship changes it's a bit different you know what i mean like it's not it's not necessarily like the sort of it makes sense if you're told that you're like the bottom of the food chain essentially mm-hmm yeah you're part of that yeah as opposed to being stolen from something yeah and you grow up being like that and your religion dictates to you that you are you know bottom of the food chain then you'll believe that i suppose and the other thing i guess to throw out there because i imagine the cruelty would change depending on the ayleid kingdoms but like there's a lot of your base elven gods which were the aedric ones um but then you've also got like the daedric uh ones worshiping the david princes and they were the places of like you know immeasurable cruelty yeah yeah that's where that makes sense you know because they still could even think that the gods have forsaken them in a way or that their elven overlords have become i guess less adherent to their own religion yeah and yeah i can see that but it's interesting there's so a lot of the gods still they're not very elven like even even akatosh being like i mean we can get into this a little bit but akatosh being like you know originally an interpretation of auriel slash aldo and slash sort of like a mix you know what i mean you're bringing in the sort of dragon element which also like i feel like to the nords the bringer of time and end of times and so on like alduin wouldn't be a a good figure actually also considering that the dragon maybe this is a bit of a law problem but like consider that this creation of the eight divines is happening in like the year 200 and something of the first era whereas isgramor's arrival was only sort of like 500 years before the start of the first era or something like that so then you've kind of got in between those 700 years of time there was like alduin running around with his dragon cult and dominating the north of skyrim i feel like they really would have had a recent experience with dragons being back you'd have the flashbacks of like i remember the last time we decided to worship dragons didn't you didn't go very well actually exactly the dragon cult was being exterminated in the early first era yeah so it's still like around so it's a bit it's a bit dicey but i mean the whole thing is shrouded in mystery even the whole concept that akatosh kind of came to alicia in a vision when akatosh in the way that she supposedly constructed it for the divine's religion didn't exist yeah yeah akatosh you know talked about this before but akatosh very much seems like a cross between the time god and elements of shore that kind of had to be removed when creating the religion because obviously shaw was so aggressively pro-men so aggressively anti-elven so that when you see the face of the dragon in the face of the man in akatosh i could kind of see that as the the human elements of shaw or shazaar whatever you want to call him being kind of implemented into akatosh but yeah it is weird with it it's an interesting i think a lot of people are asking us actually i've seen this question around a bit and it's about like what are the the sort of real gods and the problem is in the elder scrolls it's all subjective and you can't actually go the real god because especially when you look at like if you're just working off the eight divines like they were a creation like if you were looking at maybe the realist gods you could go to perhaps the first religions like if we're not talking about the daedra in just aedra the earliest religion so maybe some of the nordic ones and the elven ones you can go like aldmerian gods of men or so on but even then they are so subject to interpretation what you sort of put onto them and they don't have that sort of conscious presence like the daedra so it's there is no real way to go like what is the real god because some would go like oh kynareth is a weaker form of kind but then i'm sure there are nords and stuff out there that like no they're separate you know in the same way that in you know people could draw all kinds of like uh big mythic connections in the real world between like you know storm gods and like indra and zeus and thor and or whatnot right they could do that but that doesn't mean some might accept the connections but others will might be like no way they're separate they're different things so it's kind of like depends who you ask you can't get a concrete answer because you can't unless you have like you know the metaphysical knowledge of the universe injected straight into your brain like the godhead is the only god well yeah well and one more thing about the dragons like obviously with the dragon war there's a lot of anti-dragon sentiment going around but do you think the nords still fundamentally would have worshipped the time god dragon even though alduin seems to have like the the physical manifestation of alduin seems to have forsaken his role in the in the world and gotten greedy do you think they would see that as a corruption on the dragon as opposed to the dragon beam like do you know what you could actually another thing we got to consider too about like the politics of the time the they had to create like the worshipping the elven gods would have been heresy so if but if you change it to something like this eight divines while it might not be like oh like the best things for the nords it's only the nords living in cereal because remember at the time skyrim is still independent and in skyrim they're probably just worshiping their nordic gods like they were for for a long time like separate and really they don't really change until um king vargas and the sort of elysian order has a temporary influence but then even izmir wolf comes back and brings back the nordic pantheon so i guess they for a long time like a lot of the nords wouldn't all of a sudden convert to the eight divines perhaps some did the ones that exist there but the eight divines is a religion that is not you know antithetical to it's just like oh it's okay they can do what they want to do but it's not worshipping the elven gods you know what i mean so maybe that's a bit of a different way to look at it so they don't i guess have to they can still recognize what's a massive benefit to them like if you were to just look at tamriel as a whole and you have cereal and it's like oh this is a whole elven worship area and then it goes actually now it's not like they'd still be happy yeah absolutely but um yeah it's are there any more like uh points you want to talk about like broadly about it to find well i guess while we're talking about the foundation of it we've kind of gone into akatosh so maybe we should just start with akatosh and focus on yeah the insane god supposedly the splinter as you're saying there's two faces and all these different aspects merged together part of this aspect wants to undo time and destroy it and the other one is all about kind of like you know respecting time and the cycles um one of them loves men one of them's an elven god that hates men well it's all interesting there's a lot of and especially when you bring in the whole like you know maricarti selectives dancing atop the towers that brought about the middle dawn which kind of changed things and and according to them like you know removed the elven elements from akatosh and then hence split them which it's still hard to really understand like what it is in terms of law i think i generally like to just look at it still as this one sort of time god archetype and then look at the different versions of it and then you can build that whole like the sort of like akka concept of the different you know the insane god the time stuff all that but you know you just can't really get an idea that like oh akatosh yet confirmed split from auriel so oriole is a separate being entirely you know what i mean it's kind of hard to uh to work yeah they're different interpretations of the same thing and that's the crazy thing about dragon breaks is you know we think about what that entails but it is quite literally breaking akatosh it's breaking the dragon and stopping the passage of linear time in a place where you know that is the structure that forms the whole realm and forms the whole universe without it everyone gets kind of screwed up so you know no wonder akatosh is a bit yeah nuts but yeah so but overall no matter what sort of interpretation he generally has something to do with time and being leader of the of the pantheon essentially and i suppose being a newer god than say auriel um the the same kind of creation stories don't seem to exist in the divine's pantheon like you know you have auriel and oriel's bow and shooting shooting the heart of lorcan and all of that they don't talk about akatosh when they i guess that's another any of that it's just very vague that's another thing i guess we should talk about just a preface that when you're typically elven pantheons and elven beliefs um is like what you call like you know anewic meaning like basically not favor not looking favorable upon creation they thought it was like you know big lorcan's trick and so on we've betrayed being betrayed and everything and now we're stuck here in mortality whereas what they call what you can use as a term for like paramayik as in the other other side of the coin is you know very favorable creation they're like yes the gods loved us and created us and we were created by the gods not descended from the gods but the eight divines and and imperial religion and nordic religion all have that core underlying belief like they don't believe that these eight divines um you know were betrayed or something they believe in they were created willingly because you can i think it's the song um shazaar's song is the text i think or something like that um and it explains um shazaar's placing thing but it's like sort of shazaar came to the gods and sort of showed them all the beautiful things they could create life so they sacrificed their own power to sort of create mortality and so on so it was like a positive experience so then that's like underlies their entire religion because you know that's like the guests get down to the fundamentals so yeah their creation story changes substantially the simple involvement of shazaar or sure or law khan in the pantheon as a worship god makes it kind of innately paramedic like um you know yeah simply viewing favorably creation is is a bad thing to elves and that's why law can't always be he'll never be even though he's a bad deity to them he's never going to be worshipped or considered a part of their pantheon so that is the unusual thing unusual thing about shazar is shazaar is a recognized god in the in the imperial religion but is not included in the nine divines or at least not openly yeah you know if it is it's and it could be it could have been different much earlier as well like you could argue that um uh riemann and talos and so on and these big figures of the empire kind of took his place of reverence in in a way anyway like you know i don't even considered making a video on it before but i'll i'd have to work it out but basically that there's this sort of idea that talos is not like mantling law khan but he's like the functional sort of you know replacement for and the same as like shazaar like so shazaar was like you know pro-men and he was sort of what you know started this whole thing off but then talos has kind of become the living embodiment of him kind of but then there's all this shazarin yeah and it's you know yeah he makes his will known through through um aspects called cesareans or you know different versions of him that pop up you can't get rid of him completely even if you tear out his heart and shoot it into the ocean it's not gonna it's not gonna do the trick yeah but um yeah i suppose i suppose we could move off akatosh yeah um obviously we know there's all different interpretations like al kosh and the khajiit religion but we can hop on over to rk who says honour the earth its creatures and the spirits living and dead god intend the bounties of the mortal world and do not profane the spirits of the dead yeah life and death god i very much see him as a as fundamental to kind of almost enacting akatosh's sphere you know um really um focusing on the cycle of life and death and not and not disrespecting it by seeking immortality through a profane means or you know the undead all of this stuff it breaks the cycle it kind of disrespects time and you know being a worshiper of rk kind of guarantees you to respecting and taking part in the cycle of life and death and you know not being afraid to die and knowing that you'll come back eventually and that you know the cycle goes on and on yeah i what do you guys think about his uh his origin one of his potential origins as a mortal because i think it's a rather fanciful story just because like at the creation of rk as one of the eight divines this is way back in the first era and the sort of tone of the book of like oh it's a shopkeeper and sort of it seems like yeah i don't buy it yeah but it's cool it could easily be an example you know how like people like obviously when king arthur was first written about they're writing about it kind of like you know with modern technology and well to their modern technology they're all knights to shining armor but like the time period they're talking about is like very different in the reality of yeah he essentially becomes an archetype like um you know you know what king arthur for example represents and say there are you know he king arthur could actually be a dozen different kings in the um the old britain times doing certain things and their stories kind of get embodied into one being who just resembles these chivalric values etc etc and rk his role yeah the idea that he was just a shopkeeper doesn't really make sense for his actual origins but it kind of does align with what he represents in the eye you know kind of and it's just kind of a good being immortal himself and experiencing it kind of also you know you can now kind of gives a better understanding of the mortal cycle and having lived and done yourself and like so it's like thematically it assists i mean the the monomyth is is the more realistic but boring suggestion which is that he was just one of the first spirits to crystallize after the start of time um the shopkeeper one just for people who don't know it was that he was this shopkeeper who was just obsessed with like knowledge and learning and he just constantly was just trying to understand um this book which was written in some weird language and this and he just got like so absorbed in it that he ignored everything about about him around him sorry um then he realized it explained life and death itself but he spent so much time with his head in this book he was like about to die with an incurable plague and then he prays tamara and it's mara who says to him i'll make you archaic basically and you'll be this god living forever but in charge of the cycles of life and death or you can die and he chose to be rk apparently yeah he's his uh arcade's got more interesting interpretations in some of the some with the other pantheons but i will say i do like if you look at the because there's ideas that the um sort of celestial bodies or planets in in the sort of universe in mundus are you know representations of the of the gods themselves so they can call a planet rk but when mana marco ascended to godhood in the warp in the west he became like manifest as the necromancer's moon which orbits rk um and then eclipse i think it eclipses him once every eight days shining a purple light called the shade of the revenant and i'm pretty sure that's how they make the black soul gems and so on but that's a really cool i just like the idea of just you know the god of life and death having this sort of spiteful moon going around if you're trying to like you know what i mean like a yeah yeah no that is that is cool and it's interesting too because that's kind of in uh oblivion in the sense that you have the like the shrines and stuff that they're making the black soul gems but then you also have mana marco appearing in the flesh in the game saying i am mata marco yeah and then you kind of get into the dragon break he's sort of he's the god form and the one reality where he's immortal and the two things split so we both became the necromancer's moon but then also remained immortal which is the one you fight in oblivion but it kind of gets a bit whack there's a lot look everyone who's listened to this podcast for a while now knows that uh if you're interested in the law you have to create a lot of copes for bad writing you have to it's that's the art form you know and the unreliable narrator you can work with it because of that but yeah well before we officially started this podcast i said let's role play as gods and you two both said to bella at the same time yeah de bella de bella sounds like you know the best i like if i was in a cult like i'd be in the cult of like de bella like in all of them well it's just beauty and art and widespread cults are dedicated to both healing and sexual instruction it sounds like the most hippie beautiful existence kind of like peaceful kind of do you know what i mean like uh yeah yeah it it sounds really cool and one thing i like about dybella which is interesting i feel like here's a little take um dybella as a being of beauty and art and all of these kind of things that exist within the mortal experience and life and so on and she is a god that seems to have her origin with men and the nordic pantheon and so on it doesn't really appear in elven pantheons um so that kind of like place there is kind of like you can kind of see an underlying appreciation for life whereas elven gods don't like it like they're not you know more elves generally like they're you know scorn um they're not about being paid in moans the yeah they're too boring and i mean they're definitely like she's always going to get a bad rap because you're always going to have very pious people who are just like you know it's just a sex cult development but it's just you know but there's obviously there's so much more to it but that is never going to be removed it's like obviously in in a in a world where we live where like christianity has been so successful and it's sort of attitudes towards sexual interaction and so on whereas if you go to you know back to like the romans which is very clearly like what a lot of this is kind of um connected to is uh more influenced by had um different attitudes towards uh sex and purity and stuff and like things wouldn't it's you know what i mean like the whole idea of sexual purity and so on might not and i would probably say nails because probably does not apply but could with certain groups or so on like there's different ways of of um standards too outside of like the kind of christian um version of it or traditional christian or old christian whatever you want to call it but you know what i'm getting at um so whereas like you might not find it like the the problem with it for example for that others might have might not be that oh it's as devious kind of sexual thing that is happening elsewhere it's actually that it's about the indulgence and not valuing things like you know righteousness or work or like or like it's like the distraction like as the khajiit would say it it makes you stray from the the path yeah so the actual grievance is with the sort of indulgence sort of lifestyle and like kind of thing that's associated with it as opposed to the actual sexual purity what about a priest of rk saying you're not respecting the cycle of life and death because you're doing it recreationally well one way i look at de bella at least at least in the imperial perspective is like i i think she merges perfectly fine with mara's sphere because i the way i kind of imagine it is that you know mara is about marriage and responsibility to your partner and procreation and kind of like fertility and all of this stuff but then dybella is like oh you know there's more than just the duty and responsibility of of marriage and whatnot there's you know also being in love and being passionate about your relationship it it facilitates mara's fear so they kind of work perfectly it's like um you know the crops are only going to grow if they're fertilized and let's and and let's attitude i i agree and and i guess we can't forget the art component of the bella as well which is you know a big component may not sound as interesting but it's there i mean she has the brush of true paint artifact that we saw in oblivion which can be used to literally paint things into reality which i think is very cool as much as i don't like fighting painted trolls there's the other thing too is just about the difference between monotheism and like i guess polytheism and so on is that um in a monotheistic religion you're just sort of worshiping the one and following like their kind of you know codes and and so on whereas in in uh religions such as this um with lots of different gods you invoke them for different reasons and if that if you were like you know some artist dybella would be beneficial to you or someone that you would invoke and and pray to and want her blessings and so on yeah i was just thinking that like praying to the invoking the muse i mean arguably you can even say that like catholics for example like saints and so on is done somewhat like you know i know pray to or whatever you would reference i don't know the intricacies of it but there are like patrons of you know xyz and an artist or something then you'd you know give offering to this saint or something like that for for that but in this it's a god exactly but uh yeah she teaches no matter the seed if the shoot is nurtured with love will the flower not be beautiful so it's a very uh all-inclusive seeming what's her little symbol you know the elder scrolls online emblem i just can't i am i is it a flower being silly here no but what's what's that attached to see the thing with the blue i i think it's like a bud of a flower i tell you what it looks like a pomegranate to me it looks like a blue pomegranate but yeah like flowers and petals and stuff have generally been her kind of deal and uh yeah i don't know i just feel like it's cool like i like even in eso the de bellon doll masks if you sort of scroll down the wiki there and have a look it's just kind of like all these beautiful sort of venetian kind of masks and you can imagine like all of the cool art that would come from her cults and song and i like her representation as a moth in in the nordic pantheon just the idea of like these bright and beautiful colored wings with with many colors on a beautiful moth drawn to the light of inspiration but um yeah so there's more it's more to her than just a bit of sex yeah don't don't write it but now let's go to julianos god of logic wisdom and the arts of magic yeah julianos is a god that seems to have definitely fallen out of favor with nordic religion like junal he's a bit of an insect yeah yeah like look there's no time for for art and beauty and sex when you've got logic literature and contradiction boys associated with magic often revered by wizards like i'm saying junile nordic father of language and mathematics isn't so popular anymore i guess the dybella cult kind of kicked him out but yeah giuliano's is one of those divines that isn't particularly interesting dude it kind of needs to be there to have like all the it's like fire wind earth and then it's like okay we we just need this one because it's just it's another element he's filling the place like he he is like a schoolteacher god is the kind of vibe i get from him like i just think of you know when they say he falls out of favor well i don't think it actually gives us a specific time frame but i i i tend to think it's the magical aspect of him that has somewhat fallen out of favor because like for example after the oblivion crisis and the kind of breakdown of magical institutions and people start to look skeptically at magic like it's associated with the daedra and um i think that might be part of why he's been a bit shy yeah in the in the nordic one specifically it's that i think it's over all the attitudes when you have junile and it's like he was the god of hermetic orders and and the clever men and stuff whereas the art of the clever men sort of became less revered over time and i guess magic got associated more with the devious elves and then obviously that even gets more amplified as things go on um but uh yeah because by the time of skyrim all the nordic gods have fallen out of favor but but remember magic too to to the imperials um the imperial battle mage archetype or as a unit in their thing is very important so you can see how like you know knowledge of magic and so on has been part of their thing yeah it looks so he represents learning scholarship justice his domains include alchemy enchantment sorcery um i do like the thing he is said to encount the damned equation yeah that's cool two out of ten snooze fest let's move it on get around let's go um okay kenereth's cool her role is somewhat kind of down we're not downplayed but watered down when it comes to the imperial pantheon it's it's mostly just an association with the elements and nature and the weather and nature as opposed to her fundamental role in the in human systems like kine is far more interesting i think and you know is more heavily involved in the nords religion whereas like you're saying kynareth is uh i don't know nothing nothing particularly nothing particularly interesting and it's it's also too like her cool stuff kind of even like now they recognize like kynareth you know obviously or slash kind as the mother of the demi god maura house but it's like she was sort of known as kine back then like it was kind of pre-formation of the eight divines anyway and um yeah look to be honest kinereth specifically not kind and the other interpretations which are much cooler in my opinion um is just the nature god filling that out in the pantheon you know the god of heavens wins reigns remember there's even when you go and get the the is it the boots of the crusader and and like one of the challenges you're not supposed isn't just not supposed to fight back at the bear or something attacking or the spriggan or something is that's the challenge um yeah yeah yeah yeah when the pilgrim didn't fight back having reverence for nature allowed them entrance to the grotto where the boots were hidden and wearing the boots means that the creatures of the forest won't attack you anyway i mean at least kynareth's the mother of moro house the demigod that's kind of that's kind of cool but you can imagine some cool things like an army like you know praying to her or something before they go on a march to so you know make sure the rain stay away or favorable weather and stuff like that yeah merchants needing favorable wins to travel to sell their wares and things like that to be honest a lot of these got a lot of the defines seem rather like practical do you know what i mean like they don't remember as we said at the start they kind of just revolve around useful functions of society really i mean like kind of to the other thing is you can kind of like reduce you can say that the eight divines are almost like reduced to the archetypes the most like if we were talking about aedric archetypes and like a time god or whatever it's like akatosh feels like the most i guess like base time god like he doesn't have an elven flavor to him or he doesn't have some like nordic kind of was it based or base time just you do have to kind of tear away the stories from from these gods like for example with kind um you know the the nords believe that when it rains it's her tears mourning over the loss of shaw and that that would have been one of those aspects where it's like alicia coming up with the religion we can't really have that if we want to appease the elven elements of things so we kind of yeah as you said boil it down to the basic sphere the basic aspect of what they represent and take away a lot of the comments i think you need to be careful drew i can see your witcher necklace swinging in the background i'm knocking against it it's almost as if she's sending an earthquake to comet teach you a lesson not be me fidgeting too much but you know well how about but yeah kind of basically is a bit boring how about we look at mara mara's mara is cool everyone likes tomorrow you have to be a bit weird to not like mara mother figure goddess of love agriculture compassion fertility interesting agriculture is there i suppose it makes sense but i always associate that with the xanathar a lot more well it's kind of more so the the i guess just fertility broadly as in the fertility of the landfill everything like it's related to growing new life um but uh yeah she's obviously really um closely intertwined with marriage ceremonies as you know and skyrim and that's sort of she is the she seems to be like the marriage god really yeah um on top of other things also interestingly i think it's the elves that they believe that she was the wife of auriel whereas in the nordic one she is the the handmaiden to kind and concubine to shaw um as well so shimaru is a figure that's seen as like in relation to like the chief of the gods or whatever but so in a way she is like a um if you looked at like alduin or auriel or shaw as the father figure of their respective pantheons you could kind of see her as somewhat of a mother figure kind of yeah mummy yeah yeah yeah well except i guess kaine in the nordic one kind of takes that but she's like the extra one though she's a concubine and you can make seriously she's the side the side chick the side piece divine commands mortals to live soberly and peacefully honor your parents and preserve the peace and security of home and family it is a bit and do your homework isn't it it's very but you can kind of go like like you could see you know we were talking about like uh stuff with dybala uh dybella you could see how for example um you know things of erotic instruction and all of that kind of sort of sex cult stuff could um pull away people from what you know mara's more sacred duties of like sort of family hearth and home and and and love and like connection or something like that you know it can you know not saying it necessarily has to just you know what i'm getting at you know yeah um trying to think because everything that a lot of things that are interesting about mara are her interpretations in other culture like more or more with the red guards yeah definitely a fertility goddess with multiple arms i think she has many arms trying to grab different husbands and yeah more and so on but what's interesting there again like that's another sort of marriage sort of connection brought onto her it's also on the side on the side thing too like grabbing other people's husbands well it's yeah that's kind of it's a cool part about the race are they just men are they other people are they husbands that are already husbands or is she like making them well i guess it's sort of referring to like a polyamory like a husband being yeah quite literally so but it's kind of a different dynamic one that you don't really see like a like a a reverse harem or you know lots of dudes to give you lots of kids but um you know i don't think it works that way what lots of dudes to give you lots of yeah like different flavors of kit you know i guess so you just because you take the different husbands you get on and say yeah yeah i'm just saying that the incubation i mean i don't know four of anything else she's a god bro forearm maybe she has four worms or more four incubators yeah maybe who knows that's beast she's gonna get that bread in the oven she's a full-on she's a full-on bakery she's just churning out sourdough and nice some breaks too [Laughter] standard wouldn't be happy with all this oh no god of mercy though charity well-earned luck and justice unless of course you are like a daedra or undead in which case you will get no mercy whatsoever and he will want you wiped from the world yeah and we know he has his vigilance of standard as one example um of like people go out and crusade like he he seems like you could somehow say like a a crusader god like you know at least and i wonder how much um it's abused essentially in the same way that like um you know the call to um to to the real crusades and so on was like you know heavily abused for land stealing and and stuff like that you could um you know that righteous cause and justice honestly justice and righteousness a lot of the time it's red red flag like if you hear it like it's good intentions pave the path to what is it yeah the um the road to hell's paved with good intentions but especially when it's involved with the imperials i i like the aspect of him that is kind of related to keeping rulers in check like his idea of righteous rule by might and by might yeah as you said bit of a red flag but merciful forbearance so the idea that um the gods aren't just telling the surfs what to do it's like no the the most powerful people in the kingdom also in the empire also need to follow the gods and not become corrupt and you know follow and follow the rule of law and be a merciful good emperor so i do like that aspect of him but yeah that probably gets ignored a bit when it's go among the infirm and wounded wherever you may find them do not hoard wealth or indulge physically and you could say it's like yeah you know that's you know they're good things you should do but i feel like a lot of the emperors that model themselves like that they definitely indulge definitely hold will i don't know if it's kind of like you know the idea versus the executioner it is interesting as well that he seems to not really acknowledge worshipers like or distinguish between worshippers and heretics like he kind of treats everyone fairly but he still wants obviously you to worship him like any god would but he doesn't seem to be like a big uh favorite playing deity it's interesting too and we've kind of talked about this but like through the elvenar nordic lens through the elven lens he's seen as an apologist of men which is you know a kind of mercy apologizing for men's misgivings to the elves really but um and then in the reverse it's like uh he's a god of ransom which is kind of like the hardcore nordic version of a mercy you know telling them how to take on war prisoners instead of just killing everyone so he's a i guess he's a healthy middle ground stender in that regard and he's got a cool symbol like the whole the whole cup pouring a drink out it's just an interesting little like a holy grail yeah like like i'm just glad it's not like the scales you know what i mean like lady of justice kind of looking thing yeah yeah yeah true something different all right we got um zenifer i think he is by far the most like forgotten like if when i used to risk the least yeah i forget about him relatively well not regularly because we you know write and talk about him so much but when i was a kid xenothan would be like the one i would forget yeah like that's such a rip i i mean i like the whole idea that he is associated with the boss mary god zan yeah um which is kind of i'm pretty sure like an agriculture god yeah god of toil agriculture payment and kind but also vengeance to them which is interesting i i perhaps i could see some kind of traditional eye for an eye elements there in vengeance but he is very much a god of work and commerce and the whole concept of like you know you get ahead in life by working hard and being fair and honest and not through war bloodshed or theft um but he's yeah he's kind of an important god to stop rebellions and things like that just you know um if you if you work the fields all day in the in the hot beating sun keep at it because you'll be rewarded for it um he's the god of capitalism hey he's but he does have that more religious element of like honest work like that real honest profit honestly honest work for the farmers and then the guys that worship him like sitting there with their big coffers full of like trade and commerce and gold and they're like yeah yeah the goddess yeah it's interesting that he's also seen as a warrior god um although one who apparently is restrained and reserved in times of peace yeah i mean we've got to like put remember all of these divines are through the context of a continent spanning empire whose entire like work is conquering other people and taking their property of course we've talked about this before but and like one day we'll do it basically like why the empire are not these like good guys like these super good guys like they do like everyone is very anti-imperialism and anti-empires in the modern world and so on but they seem to kind of forget that this is what's happening to them it's very easy to to paint the stormcloaks as like some very like oh they're just a bunch of silly racist types and i mean a lot of them are very xenophobic but you can imagine how would you feel if some other kind of like faction i suppose came to your province or country told you you couldn't worship your god and had agents roaming around that would like you know it's like 1984 kind of thought police like if they find you they're going to take somebody to kill you were they ever that bad were they ever that bad in the places where they i'm talking about where they tell us like literally in by the time of skyrim there's thou more agents that they've permitted to walk around in skyrim capture nords who worship talos and take them away and look some people will go like oh they've been but they've been part of the empire for ages and all of that kind of stuff but it's like you know scotland's been um scotland or ireland for example there's a lot of people there would very much like their independence or their own cultural sort of things but they've been able to get right just to add to the add to the talos point i feel like i would put most of the blame for that on the old mary dominion over the empire i think if the empire were had a cheat you know i'm talking about them like they're this monolith but obviously it depends on who's in power and who's on the council and who's the emperor the empire but i feel like the the empire is not going to be imposing you know torture and death penalty for worshiping talos and and other examples of them i'm not saying imperialism is a good thing but spreading into other continents they tend to do it with some grace like for example like looking at black mush things didn't go that well but the idea is they put in infrastructure they don't try to mess with the um the local cultures too much they try to integrate it and try to feel like they couldn't in black marsh and same as mine they put it look at it they install a puppet king and if you look at the like political trajectory of morrowind in the time since it was conquered compared to you know the 400 years later or whatever by the end of the third era it was going in a very different place yeah look my whole my whole point i'm saying is it's not like crazy dogmatic you know worship if you worship someone who's not out you're right but that's not that but my point was simply just that the empire is so much worse than everyone thinks and they definitely do go into other cultures territories and change things yeah it's simply put it's the same as the roman empire a lot of their motivations wasn't like it's not like a religious crusade or dominance or anything like that they just go in for economic reasons fund some wars go take bounty you know control new places new resorts it's just it's just not black and white like a lot of people were very much like oh yeah the empire is the good guys and the storm i mean the bad guys and it's like there's some nuance there yeah like you know what a good game is look at the elder scrolls adventures red guard and that's all about the resistance to to type septum's empire and actually shows you the other side and it's like he's not coming in and and to add to that to to unleash a giant brass god on the somerset isles to bring money it's like the equivalent of like a nuke in our real world in terms of destruction way more even like you know if you believe the outer cannon sort of law they're like unleashing a thousand years of broken time war with mirror logicians or whatnot oh yeah yeah but even not like you know then he goes around and like you know um uses the numidium to purge unloyal families and stuff like that like diver scepter was a bastard [Laughter] awful dude well it it i think that's the perfect segue to talk about talos the final divine if you would like to include nine divines in your list yeah so um yeah i mean i i think it's kind of like there is obviously i don't think the you know the admiral dominion are just trying to stop his worship or so on but like he he is a uh god a divine essence like the story of um of daggerfall and and how it all plays out like he most certainly has like some sort of you know divinity for sure um but yeah like we've kind of touched on this before that tiber septim or you know talos as he's known becomes like a uh sort of god or focus point for like other emperors to aspire to and for sort of he is like a manifestation a divine manifestation of the empire itself but um one thing that really gripes me and i think i was loading up oblivion recently and then in one of the lines or something it's like oh the septum empire is like direct descendants of of type of septum they're not like the entire set is not direct at all and that's a loading screen too which is meant to be considered like you know canon this is the kind of myth they could run with i guess though you never know the modern world or this is the other thing this is kind of contrived by like ancient some ancient people and older groups had different understandings of like heredita um you know hereditary lines and so on it a lot of the time it's like not necessarily um not a lot of the time but some of the time not necessarily just straight up like blood and genetics really like we're looking back at things from a very genetic kind of like for example like uh blood bonds and blunder blood brothers and so on in a lot of cultures were treated very literally as brothers it was the same as a genetic brother when you make those bonds it's a um because they didn't have like some genetic understanding they're looking at it for a more like religious kind of spiritual cultural kind of connection and when you make you know that kind of connection so in that same way there's there's examples of like uh different ideas of you know how they could work it i don't know like how the how the her like you know what i mean they're head canoning that they're a direct descendant but if you look at the actual like timeline that everyone's descended functionally from tiber septim's brother on his um type of septum's niece really is the next crown kintara well the idea that tiber septim deserves a place amongst the divines is kind of weird when you've got riemann who is he's a he's a cultural god he's a cultural hero to the imperials and really it makes sense that tiber septim would be the same but it's it's definitely these kind of other elements of talos that make tell us what talos is that he's kind of sneaking into the divines it's definitely definitely a bit of um shaw or lorkhan's work remember and to just to keep bear in mind like obviously if you you know when you play the games or read the law like you can get all of the heresies and the stories and the backstory and stuff but the typical if you go around to the imperials or if you go to the storm cloaks today and so on they believe that tiber septim was such a great man the talos of atmora that he literally just turned into a god because he's so cool in the same way that that's how a lot of the um that people believed that vivec almalexia and so the silver created they achieved apotheosis by just being so like whoa enlightened and boom like they don't have like it's not part of their scripture that they you know murdered nerevar and stole the heart of lorcan in the same way that it's not in the scripture that you know that's why the tyrion is a heresy is a heresy it's not yeah it is interesting to to read some of the reasons they come up with um by the time of skyrim as to why worshipping uh talos was a mistake like the talos mistake book and it's like very pandering to the thalmor it says our foul more friends who will may we find centuries of peace and prosperity with our new thalmor friends but basically they say worshiping talos was a mistake because it basically distracted them from the eight who are more important it pushed people away from the eight divines the true gods who do deserve our love and reverence and all focusing way too much on talos um who weakened the memory of the man tiber septim i mean it's like it's the kind of thing it's like i don't necessarily disagree either because talos has never been my like you know favorite god or anything like i didn't you know what i mean we've got a bunch of uh thalmor supporters to blink blink twice if you've uh if you've been captured well one thing like tying it back to what we said near the beginning is it is kind of important to the divine's religion that there be a fairly strong disconnect between the mortals who worship them and the gods themselves they're very um disassociated from the people because they kind of the idea is they sacrifice their power to create the world and to maintain it and with the exception of a few serious instances they don't really meddle at all whereas with talos you've got this this figure who was a part of many of these people's lives they know all of these stories they've got all of these interactions with him so yeah if he does join the divines he does become the centerpiece because you know while all the others are just chilling and not really getting involved if they can even get involved talos is a big part of human society so okay because you've got just a joke to say [Music] it's not a joke it's actually interesting is that in in morrowind there's uh an avatar of tiber septum talos called wolf and he actually i just like his opinion he says the emperor is getting old don't know how much longer he'll hang on so is the whole empire for that matter getting old that is the emperor and the legions have held the empire together for hundreds of years it's been a good thing by and large but maybe it's time for a change time for something young and new what no idea because i'm old old dog doesn't get new ideas but maybe young folks like you should try some new ideas i don't know could be messy but change is never pretty but it's just interesting that like the his if you were to take that as complete like truth and so it's kind of like tell us like yeah given up he's like yeah whatever the empire's dead going like he's done because he doesn't care man he's a god now like you can imagine that kind of thing and this is the sort of theory working theory behind a lot of kim stuff anyway is that when you become so divine and so all-powerful you you become estranged from like the pity like creating what about the whole idea what about the whole idea that the thalmor kind of want to kill talos by killing the worship of him because entities receive power through worship like wouldn't he care about that well there's the there's the kind of i don't know like it's kind of hard to work it in with all of the kim stuff and so on because there's it gets really complicated and contrived like in the same way that vivek like kim god vivec is like different to like living god it gets a bit anyway it gets a bit crazy i was gonna say anyway before that talos i can see how talos would become a very tempting god because let's be real a lot of the other ones are pretty like generic and then you've got this god that's basically like i was like you and i ascended to godhood it's this very ambitious like maybe i can become a god too if i do good deeds and conquer the world and it's got a good story a good back story you know yeah personality you know yeah plus to to answer your question as well michael um the if we if we buy into the idea that talos is kind of the mingled aspect of these these different figures one of which being wolf half being a um an aspect of shore if the elves are trying to get rid of talosh worship it absolutely ensures interest to kind of keep staying relevant and staying a part of things and to continue undermining the elves at every at every uh yeah so so talos worship will cause conflict beyond just this civil war in skyrim so long as you've talked about before as like that he could tell us could be like the you know metaphysical like rebirth or reincarnation of sure like if you go with the idea that you know xeronaxis and izmir and all that would give you like cesareans or whatnot and the three kind of like pieces kind of come back into talos and then there's all these kind of other theories that you can kind of go like talos you know manifest like a cesarean like related like i'm being related to the last dragonborn and him being a manifestation of all that and you know staving off the end of the world but yeah that's all gets into like a lot of crazy theory stuff but um but yeah so that brings us to the end of the device yeah ladies and gentlemen we have a very interesting podcast coming next where we're going to be going through a bunch of your questions so definitely stay tuned for that social media links are down in the description below as is a link to buy some fudge muppet merch if you want to get a sick t-shirt like this one and scott finish the outro bye see y'all see you next time

Channel: FudgeMuppet

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Id: Fl9jYdafxdg

Length: 60min 56sec (3656 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 27 2021