Seht and Azura

Boethiah and Azura are the principles of the universal plot, which is begetting, which is creation, and Mephala makes it an art form.

—Sermon Six

Mephala and Azura are the twin gates of tradition and Boethiah is the secret flame.

—Sermon Six

Azura is a tough egg to crack. But here we go, friends.

This week we saw a wonderful piece about Towers being stories of Creation, and this is the universal plot that plays out again and again in the Anuad, the Yokudan creation myth, Shor son of Shor, the Five Songs of King Wulfharth including the Secret Song, and the various other accounts of Red Mountain, which you can check out on The Imperial Library.

In Sermon Six, Vivec posits that this universal narrative that echoes throughout the Mundus in different cultural contexts are manifested through the Anticipations. Boethiah and Azura, as the principles of this plot would seem to fit the roles of Mother and Father, which would make sense in the context of the roles of Ayem as the Mother, as I previously discussed here; and Seht who is described as the Father in the same Sermon.

It took me a long time to understand why Azura would be Seht’s Anticipation, my grasp on it is as yet slippery, and the difficulty and solution lie in their complex and intertwined genders.

Azura is a beautiful name, that makes one think of a gorgeous deep blue sky, and she manifests as a beautiful, shapely young woman balancing a moon and sun/star in her hands. She often has her breasts exposed, reminiscent of Lady Justice, but rather than representing trust and vulnerability, it has the feel of a declaration or manifesto, but of what about is not immediately clear.

Like any Daedric Prince, her gender is fluid and interchangeable, but it is in a way that seems more offensive than the others, as so eloquently discussed in this post linked on Lady Nerevar’s Tumblr.

The post presents Azura as a pretender to femininity, without any of the frailties that go with the power of creation. Why are Boethiah and Mephala not pretenders? They are equally invulnerable in their female forms, like any Prince, and they also blend the masculine and feminine with an impunity that defies any form of realism.

Perhaps the answer is twofold: it lies in her protonymic and Vivec’s own perception of gender, and parenthood in general. We assume Vivec is a reliable narrator, because he is the author of many a primary source, but he is and was a mortal with more than the average number of foibles once.

Azura’s Protonymic as invoked in The Trial of Vivec: youth and return, the lover’s morning, the loved one’s end.

Paraphrased: the Idealism of Youth. Boethiah and Mephala, indeed any other Daedric Prince swap genders as a matter of convenience, a power play, a transaction.

However, Azura uses it as a way of making hirself perfect. It is this vanity, this unrealistic ideal of feminine power and invulnerability that is so offensive to the senses of Vehk, perhaps because he has personally felt the sting of the vulnerability of the female form himself, while understanding the raw power and potential.

She flouts the Compromise, as accused at the Trial of Vivec, the feminine aspect of the universal plot as agreed by the feminine Earthbones, manifested primarily by Kyne,Mara and Dibella. While Vivec has no problem with a mortal taking Heaven through Violence, clearly there is an objection to a Prince taking Perfection through Hypocrisy. In order to violate the Convention, one must accept it on some level.

So taking this stance that Azura’s femininity is largely a violation of Convention and a misrepresentation of female power and vulnerability, let us examine Azura’s masculinity.

She is largely invulnerable, aggressive, possessive, jealous and fundamentally a teacher, mentor and guardian. These are quite masculine traits, although they often manifest in both genders. These are often traits associated with, well… fathers, especially in the archetypal sense. The Provider. The Lover. The Protector of Him and His; typically it is the place for the Father to be idealistic, the Mother is the nurturer, the realist, the one that bows their head to the forces of nature.

We all know that Azura represents these paternalistic ideas, a great source for this, which ironically sticks to the feminine pronoun and manifestation is the Invocation of Azura. A good mother will love her children no matter how self-loathing and challenging they are, no matter how flawed that love is, the mother-child-love is complex in its lack of conditions and the ensuring entangled emotions.

Paternal love is different. Yes, there is a large sense of unconditional love, particularly with modern fatherhood, but paternal love is more of a reflection of the individual personalities than some complex biological survival and bonding mechanism. And this is the love described in the Invocation of Azura.

We see children that grow up without a father as a certain kind of unfortunate, but one that is still in the realms of normal. But there is a special sympathy for those that grow up without a mother.

Azura tries to blend the best of both maternal and paternal love into a powerful and all-consuming bond that I am sure any single parents in the audience can agree is insane and unsustainable. You cannot be all things, and it is in our nature to resent and despise anyone who pretends otherwise, because it emphasizes our own limitations and inadequacies.

As flawed mortals, there is a certain schadenfreude that comes from seeing these attempts at perfection fail, which is why some people are satisfied when Ayem goes nuts, or Azura gets a Muatra in the mouth (that is for another essay).

Sotha Sil, the Clockwork King: The Father is a machine and the mouth of a machine. His only mystery is an invitation to elaborate further

—Sermon Six

Seht also seeks a certain idealised perfection, which would draw him to an ostensibly powerful alpha-figure such as Azura. As Ayem would admire the cunning and machinations of Boethiah; Seht would greatly appreciate the invulnerable and mysterious Azura.

Seht did not start off as an alpha-figure. The last survivor of a minor Dunmer house, unmarried and without children is hardly the picture of masculine omnipotence. Like any mortal with mortal ambitions, he wanted more and better, and through Azura there was hope for perfection, not only of himself, but of the world around him.

Perfectionism seems to be a running theme in these ALMSIVI characters. Ayem sought to be the Super Mom, who could defend her land, love its people and raise its children without losing her ever-loving mind. Seht would then seek perfect understanding, knowledge and ultimately, control of the narrative of Creation.

Historically and archetypically, the realm of science and knowledge has belonged to men. Not alpha men, but the clever men who, being physically smaller and weaker than the alpha-class of jocular beasts (see Trinimac, Stuh or Tsun juxtaposed with Jhunal in Shor son of Shor for further demonstration of this alpha/beta male dichotomy) would not be able to achieve high status otherwise. Seht sought to marry these two sides of the masculine ideal to perfect himself.

This is why he is often robotic in nature. Through science and knowledge, he sought to build a more powerful Seht, but the robotic depiction shows the artifice of this ideal. Seht, unlike his Anticipation, was willing to acknowledge his limitations and compensate for them without hiding or denying them. Unlike his sister, he would not sacrifice his sanity by stretching himself so thin that his grip on reality should snap.

Like Kyne, Mara and Dibella, Seht bows his head to the limits of masculine power. If you spend all that time building muscles and the skills of a warrior, you cannot devote your time to the study of mystery, not to the extent that Seht wanted to delve. This is the crux of the alpha-male.

After bowing his head to the natural order, Seht then proceeds to change the natural order; a fairly masculine tendency, to control and manipulate the environment, rather than acquiesce. He does this through the world mechanism, and it is through this that even eventually does achieve the ultimate victory, although not without a price.

Stepping away from gender for a moment, I would like to discuss the most intimate connection between Seht and Azura, which is represented through Seht’s Clockwork and Azura’s neonymic, the dusk and dawn.

As /u/NudeProvided stated so nicely in Azura’s Cradle:

It said that she is the dawn and dusk, but this is a falsehood; she is the mechanism that allows the changing of the two.

The most primal marking of the passage of time is the rising and setting of the sun. This is Azura. The invention of a clock, to count minutes and seconds rather than measuring the amount of light in the sky, was the next progression. You need Time to be linear in order for anything to make sense, but you need to be able to measure time in order to put things in sequence, so you can remember events logically. And this brings me to the concept of Seht as a Mother, as depicted in the recent release of MK’s drawing, which on his recommendation we shall simply call The Tribunal.

This is so much more than him simply usurping the feminine sphere, like Azura. He is no pretender, he does not use this as a form of self-aggrandizement, and his idea of perfection has matured a great deal beyond simply wanting to overcome his physical inadequacies.

In the Lessons and in the works of Aleister Crowley, we discuss at length this slippery concept of sex-death, and Love. Rather than being a concept of affection, tenderness and attachment, it is more about unification, transformation through unification, and a creation of something new through the elimination of something old. This is often a more violent process than one would assume, as it involves irrevocable change and a break with the past.

So when we think sex-death, most of us think of intercourse, but there is another transformation that involves a kind of sex-death: Pregnancy and Childbirth. It is a continuation of this marriage by secret murder as the lovers become parents in a moment of pain and emotion. And unlike sex magic, this is not magic, it is a real and permanent change to the reality of the lovers, a merging of their narratives that will persevere even after the relationship between them ends. The lovers, such as we knew them, are dead.

We assume that this was Vivec’s domain, as evinced in the Sermons. Sermons Nine and Eighteen say it:

Vivec then reached out from the egg all his limbs and features, merging with the simulacrum of his mother, gilled and blended in all the arts of the star-wounded East, under water and in fire and in metal and in ash, six times the wise, and he became the union of male and female, the magic hermaphrodite, the martial axiom, the sex-death of language and unique in all the middle world.

—Sermon 9

Ayem said, “This is why you were born of a netchiman’s wife and destined to merge with the simulacrum of your mother, gilled and blended in all the arts of the star-wounded East, under water and in fire and in metal and in ash, six times the wise, to became the union of male and female, the magic hermaphrodite, the martial axiom, the sex-death of language and unique in all the middle world.”

—Sermon 19

But also remember this quote from Sermon 13:

Ayem is the plot. Seht is the ending. I am the enigma that must be > removed. These are why my words are armed to the teeth.

Emphasis mine. Of course I will discuss Vivec in deeper detail, in another essay, but suffice to say we are all aware of the ambiguity, ambivalence and enigma represented by Vivec. He is a puzzle to solve.

Seht is the ending.

Seht solves the puzzle. In becoming a Mother himself, the mother of Memory no less, Seht discovers how to control an Amaranth. Whether Jubal is literally the Flower Baby or merely the parent of the Flower Baby is immaterial. A child is the product of its upbringing, and its upbringing is the product of the experience of the primary caregivers (parents). A person’s experience is recorded in their Memory.

Do you see what Seht did? He knew that Vivec was going to birth the Amaranth, this was a given. Seht could either: accept his own obscurity and go to Jubal’s bachelor party in the hopes that he would be remembered and part of the new Dream, like the Aedra did; or he could raise Memory, and completely define the new Dream from within.

This is why Vivec is so disappointed in the drawing, Seht takes from Vivec his mystery. In the drawing, Seht is looking kind of worse for wear, but unlike his Anticipation, he understands the cost of his victory. He nods at the Earth Bones and the Compromise by understanding that through the birth of Memory, Seht will no longer exist as he has been understood thus far.

This is why Seht does not have legs, he himself is not becoming an Amaranth, he is not becoming immortal the way the others are immortal.

Vivec and Almalexia call traditional gender roles into question; Seht renders them irrelevant.

Here is where Seht’s story and Azura’s diverge, because my unsubstantiated gut reaction thus far is that this is Seht’s victory alone. He is the one that removed the enigma, he is the one that is birthing memory. He is no longer Seht-who-is-Azura, but simply himself, the Mother-Father of Memory.

The following blessing from Sermon 24 is a prophecy for his future role:

“To my sister-brother’s city I give safe passage through the dark corners still left of Molag Bal, and I give it this spell as well: SO-T-HA SIL, which is my name to the mighty. It will protect the lost unless their flight is on purpose and fill all the roads and alleys with the mystery paths of civilization, and give the city a mind and make of it a conduit to the full concentrate of the ALMSIVI.”

The ending of the words is SOTHA SIL.

The next essay, about Vivec, will come at a later time, hopefully not too long.