Analyzing the Altmeri Commentary on Talos

After-the-fact preface: The idea has recently been floated that the Towers are not nearly as important to the stability of Mundus as the lore community generally believes, and I'm inclined to agree. Rather, I see the Towers primarily as mythopoeia amplifiers, means to define reality. This is made evident in ESO as well as out-of-game texts. If they are related to stability at all, they are related to things like climate and magical defense and ecology and so on, things that keep a culture's way of life viable. So, the following is slightly off-base in terms of my interpretation. More about this at the bottom of the post.

All right, I think it's a good time to take a hard look at this text and dissect its possible interpretations. It gets used to justify so many claims about the Thalmor endgame, but I'm not so sure most of those claims hold up.

> To kill Man is to reach Heaven, from where we came before the Doom Drum's iniquity. When we accomplish this, we can escape the mockery and long shame of the Material Prison.

> To achieve this goal, we must:

> 1) Erase the Upstart Talos from the mythic. His presence fortifies the Wheel of the Convention, and binds our souls to this plane.

> 2) Remove Man not just from the world, but from the Pattern of Possibility, so that the very idea of them can be forgotten and thereby never again repeated.

> 3) With Talos and the Sons of Talos removed, the Dragon will become ours to unbind. The world of mortals will be over. The Dragon will uncoil his hold on the stagnancy of linear time and move as Free Serpent again, moving through the Aether without measure or burden, spilling time along the innumerable roads we once travelled. And with that we will regain the mantle of the imperishable spirit.

So, there it is, in all its hostile glory. Let's get started, eh?

Tower Destruction

The most prevalent interpretation of this is that the Thalmor are trying to destroy the Towers in order to destroy Mundus and "regain the mantle of the imperishable spirit." This is mostly based on the understanding that the Towers stabilize Mundus, so if the Thalmor want to destroy Mundus, they gotta get through the Towers first.

Problem is, it's not supported by the Altmeri Commentary. Like, at all. It doesn't mention Towers once. If we're to take the Altmeri Commentary as the stated goals of the Thalmor, then the Thalmor don't care about the Towers.

If their goal is truly to undo Time, it seems like they should care about the Towers (which, among other things, serve as markers/enforcers of Time), but that doesn't seem to be the case at first glance.

"Erase the Upstart Talos from the mythic."

Here's the real meat of the text. Let's look at what is actually being said, since they aren't saying anything directly about destroying or deactivating Towers.

They want to "kill Man" to "escape the mockery and long shame of the Material Prison." To do this, they list out three separate parts, seemingly in chronological order. I specify that because it invalidates the claim that destroying all the humans will destroy Talos.

These parts are numbered, in a sequence, with the third (being the "we win" step) requiring the prior two in order to happen. From that I think it's reasonable to read the first and second as happening in that order as well. That's just the nature of a sequential list. And the first goal is to "erase the Upstart Talos from the mythic," whereas the second is to "remove Man not just from the world, but from the Pattern of Possibility." If it happens in that order, then clearly the second can't be a prerequisite for the first.

So what are they actually claiming? And why is erasing Talos from the mythic so important to the goal of unbinding Mundus? Well, because Talos is a Tower. Yes, I know, I just pointed out that they don't seem to care about Towers. This is a bit where it just doesn't really make sense; undoing Time and Mundus requires caring about the Towers. Seems pretty unavoidable to me, since the Towers are the structures that create and maintain Time, starting with Auriel's adamantine spike. The best I can come up with to sweep this under the rug is that they do care about the Towers, but they're being loud zealots about Talos in particular because 1. they hate him so much and 2. he's one of two Towers that are gods, and the only one that is reliably self-directed. They're focused on him in this text because he's the Big Fish, the one they really have to worry about.

Anyway, the word "mythic" is important here. Towers are mythitecture. So erasing Talos from the mythic does not require destroying Talos (which is basically impossible at this point anyway, what with CHIM and its Eternal I). All it requires is deactivating Talos as a Tower, which, in Talos' case, means destroying his Stone. What that is, I dunno for sure. I suspect it's the existence of the Third Empire. If that's the case, then the Thalmor efforts to discourage his worship make total sense, since he's the patron god of the Empire itself; give up on him and, at least in symbol, you're giving up on his Empire, taking it out of his possession. This part doesn't require the removal of humans from existence.

The next part does, of course, because the removal of humans from existence is the next part. Not really sure how they hope to accomplish this without literally murdering every single human. I suspect they attempted to use Numidium for this, and screwed up royally.

Third step is, of course, the "we win" step. And they do! Kinda. If you squint and ignore their total erasure from the Aurbis in the process of "winning," and also the continued presence of Mundus even in its broken state (thanks Seht!).

Is this even a Thalmor text to begin with?

Here's where it gets kinda tricky. It seems extremely unrealistic to me for the Thalmor as a whole to be on board with this plan, especially considering most of them seem focused on the elven supremacy parts of their ideology. It would just be cartoonish for every Thalmor agent and bureaucrat to be like, "Yo, let's destroy the only home we've ever known and everyone else on it. Fuck 'em." Sure, you could say the Thalmor think it would be for everyone's good and putting humans out of their misery and so on, and that does take some of the edge off the "BLOW IT UP" attitude. But it's still cartoonish in this regard: It would be talked about somewhere in Skyrim if every or even most Thalmor had this ideology, but instead we get line after line about elven rule being more legitimate than human rule, and the Empire being corrupt and bloated and so on. (Don't worry: I'll mention Ancano in a bit.) Unmaking Mundus doesn't even really line up with their overall fascist silhouette: How can you keep everyone in line and under your elven boots if you unmake the very concept of sequence and the Material Prison?

And the text isn't signed, or attributed, or dated. We only know that it appears to be from an Altmeri perspective, at some point after Talos' apotheosis. Not all Altmer are Thalmor; usually this gets used to point out that not all Altmer are as fanatical as the Thalmor, or indeed fanatical at all, but in this case, it might be that not all Thalmor are as fanatical as this particular Altmer, who might not even be Thalmor.

However, as /u/Sakazwal pointed out, it does line up suspiciously with the whole "banning Talos worship" thing, so I think it's safe to assume for now that this ideology, or something like it, is active somewhere in the Thalmor hierarchy. But where?

The (Super-)Mundane Thalmor

The only way I can think of for all this to fit together is that there is a distinction between the vast majority of the Thalmor, who want elven supremacy on Tamriel, and an even more radical portion that want to destroy Mundus entirely and ascend as immortal spirits. I'll call the former the Mundane Thalmor and the latter the Super-Mundane Thalmor just for convenience.

The Super-Mundane would have to be in a position of power over the Mundane, so they can't be too far from the top. Either at the top, or able to manipulate the top. Seems most realistic for them to be a small group, somewhere in the dozens at most. The elite few, who can keep secrets and steer situations in their favor, using the larger body of the Thalmor and the Dominion to wage war on humans as a useful tool and cover for their more metaphysical goals. The secret few who might just include Ancano, who appears to work alone and who uttered that oft-debated line about "the power to unmake the world at [his] fingertips."

This picture accounts, I think, for both the general attitude of common Mundane Thalmor agents as encountered in Skyrim and the more grandiose text of the Super-Mundane Altmeri Commentary; however, I also only hold it to be the case very conditionally. It's fragile, and depends entirely on the picture we get in future games and texts.

After-the-fact appendix: So, if we throw out the idea that Talos, as a Tower, keeps the Thalmor from destroying Mundus, there are two questions: First, what does prevent them from doing so? And, second, why do they care so much about Talos, then?

What prevents them from doing so is Convention itself, which Adamantia enables by defining an unassailable reality in which it takes place. The other Towers are echoes of Adamantia, not necessarily its equals. And another factor that may prevent them from accomplishing their goal could be that they just don't have the means yet. They may lack knowledge or power of some kind.

This brings me to why they care about Talos. It's possible that Talos fortifies Convention in a way that no other Tower does. Notice that the Commentary specifies that he fortifies the wheel of Convention. Consider that the Nu-Mantia intercept from which we pull so much Tower lore concerns itself very specifically with White-Gold, which has "a power over creatia unalike any on this plane(t)." It's the Wheel within the Wheel, and fortifying it does stabilize the existence of Mundus and the Convention that takes place on it, because it is Mundus, whereas other Towers likely do not possess the same mythic power. So if Talos fortifies White-Gold, which is the history and dominance of Cyrodiil (passed from the Ayleids to the Imperials), then he is an obstacle to their goal in a way that no other Tower is. And he certainly does fortify it, by being a Tower of the Third Empire specifically. So, to get to Convention, they may have to get control of White-Gold first, which involves fighting against Talos' influence.