Anui-El and Sithis: Love and Strife

The Greek philosopher Empedocles believed that in addition to the four elements, there were two primordial forces, Love and Strife. As well as manifesting in human emotions, these forces governed how the elements mixed and separated in order to form new elements.

My theory is that while Anu and Padhome represent the abstract concepts of IS and IS NOT, their souls Anui-El and Sithis represent the forces of Love and Strife.

Now, by Love, I do not mean it in the way Vivec means it. I mean it as in the attracting force that brings objects together. Its opposite, Strife, is a repulsive force that separates objects.

In the beginning, there was nothing but a big lump of Anu. Through his internal contemplation, he gave birth to his self-awareness, Anu-iel. Being Anu's self awareness, Anu-iel represents the cosmic unity of all things, and by extension the desire to return to that unity. Through becoming self-aware, Anu also became aware of the possibility of something being separate from him, and that is Sithis. Through the force of Sithis, Anu was divided from a homogeneous mass into the myriad aspects of Aurbis.

Akatosh is the soul of Anu-iel because he is the bulwark against the division of Sithis. Through introducing the concept of time, he allowed the existence of permanence. Before him, anything that formed from the aurbical soup was immediately broken down back into its components. Sithis countered this with the formation of Lorkhan, who tricked the Aedra into becoming mortal and caused them to be divided into smaller chunks: the mortal races of Nirn. One can also note that Lorkhan is the Space God, and space is what separates every particle.

The classifications of Anu-iel and Sithis as being Stasis and Change or Creation and Destruction are misnomers. Every physics student knows matter cannot be created or destroyed: it can only be mixed into new forms or separated. Mixture and separation, Love and Strife, Anu-iel and Sithis. Likewise, Anu is associated with stasis because stasis is the original state of the united Aurbis, and Padhome with change because he is what upsets the status quo. If there was an Aurbis where entropy ran backwards, where all things started as individual atoms that over time merged into more complicated forms, then one could quite easily claim that Padhome is stasis and Anu is change.

One could easily see why the Anuic forces, the Star Orphans and Aedra, united to build Mundus together, while the Padomaic Daedra built their private Oblivion realms by themselves for themselves.

Micheal Kirkbride, when asked about SITHIST, claimed it represented misanthropy. Now, misanthropy is a form of separation, as it is the individual separating himself from the rest of his society. The 36 Lessons of Vivec claim that "SITHIST is the start of all houses". I take this to mean that all organizations are the result of people separating themselves from others in order to form their own little club. The word "party" has the same etymological roots as the word "apart", as a party is a group of individuals that differentiate themselves from others.

CHIM is the union of these two forces: acknowledging the unity of all things while maintaining your individuality. Likewise, you could say the same thing about Amaranth: it is the ultimate form of separation, being the division of the Self from the Godhead, yet it was achieved through marriage, the union of Jubal and Vivec.