The Seas: The Other Heaven

This week's theme had me considering the many discussions we have had on this forum about the role of water as Memory, and therefore of the symbolism of the vast and largely unknown oceans of Nirn.

Allow me to introduce a few sources for this discussion: The Drowned Lamp, The Number Eight, and Sermons 22, 28 and 29.

Pardon the hokey source for the symbolism of the Number Eight, however I found it to be a rather pithy and useful resource without resorting to obscure biblical and spiritual documents.

The purpose of this thread is to explore the connections between these items. I am not professing any expertise or superior understanding, simply my perspective and an invitation to others to share their own.

A lamp is a source and gateway of light, and symbolically, wisdom from God. To drown a lamp is to obscure, or extinguish this light. Or perhaps to give the impression of extinction. What if the lamp stays lit as Vivec implies in Sermon 22?

The lamp image, particularly the Drowned Lamp image, I think has a manifold meaning in the lore, which is why it is so difficult for us as a community to pin it down. I believe on the one hand, it does indeed represent knowledge, wisdom and existence lost; submerged and overcome by the tides of Memory.

I also am starting to wonder, if on another level, it is also a particularly artful metaphor for all of creation: The Towers are wicks in a sacred lamp, one end far below the earth, dipping into the enigmatic Waters of Memory, the other end reaching towards Aetherius and the Un-time, bursting into the flame of life in the middle earth between.

But where there are clouds, there is moisture and there is Water, and Memory flows everywhere even if not in tangible liquid form. In this image, all Towers are Drowned, as none seem to be able to pierce the clouds (barring perhaps Numidium, which is fascinating, isn't it?)

And if that was the case, perhaps these wicks are completely submerged, and the flame of light is not the Mundus, as we would think but Aetherius? The Mundus would be nothing more than fuel for the Magna-Ge's blue flame.

Maybe some fellow scholars can help me develop that idea a little bit more.

The Number Eight. The Little Holy number of the Pythagoreans. The upright infinity. The numeral representing the cycle of karma and rebirth. The number associated with the Drowned Lamp in Sermon 29's Scripture of the Numbers. Adding this layer, how do we tie the imagery of the infinite to the above?

This could imply that the Drowned Lamp is actually unextinguishable. Rather than a symbol of what is lost, it is actually a symbol for what cannot be destroyed. What we see as "lost" is actually just taken a new form that perhaps we do not understand in our current context.

Or perhaps it is saying that when we Drown the Lamp, it is being submerged in its own fuel (memories), perpetuating its own infinite cycle.

Could it be that the Drowned Lamp is Lyg, and other Adjacent places, a source of wisdom and enlightenment in our current reality, but the source is beyond (most of) our reach.

Maybe it is all of those things, I honestly cannot decide.

Sermon 28 describes Vivec fighting the 5th Monster, the Ruddy Man, who was from the Kalpa ruled by the Dreugh, who revered Molag Bal. In the story, you see some cross-kalpic interactions: They re-iterate that it was the Dreugh who remade his mother, and that Vivec himself, "dropped an old image of Molag Bal into the world: a dead carapace of memory".

That shell is then worn by first the Velothi child then the shaman, that memory is being interpreted by someone born of the current kalpa, being changed; but also is directly changing the current kalpa. These events are the tail becoming one with the esophagus of the serpent, the teeth and spines pierce through possibility and plausibilty with terrible violence. Tooth or spine? Future or past? It does not really matter when they inevitably meet.

The sky is mirrored in the Sea, and during any un-time events, the Sea can come to be mirrored by the sky. Perhaps, although this is pure conjecture, there are other times where the seas can influence Aetherius, that we simply have not observed or connected yet.

I would posit that the ocean could be just as much of a mythopoeic conduit as the skies, and perhaps is the way to immortality used by lesser-understood races such as the Maormer and the ancient Yoku.

Vivec was the middle air, so while he does have knowledge and some interchange of influence with the seas, his writings do not centre around the seas. The Seas were Seht’s.

So where does this leave us? Standing on the shores of forever, distrusting and unsure. The skies above are visible, well-documented, venerated in the common mythos.

The lights from above are distorted on the wine-dark surface, tiny lamps drowning in the undulating current.

Maybe there is a Tower out there, which is a ship sailing between the two...