The Evolution of Aldmeri Faith

The original Aldmeri faith was a system of ancestor worship. According to this belief, the ancestors of the Aldmer died when creating the world, but their ghosts lingered on. All sorts of natural forces were attributed to the whims of these ghosts, from the running of time to the existence of gravity. As time went on, there came to be a belief that the most powerful of the ancestors did not die, but lived on in the heavens. The dead ancestors became known as the Ehlnofey, and the living ancestors became known as the Aedra. Those spirits who the Aldmer denied ancestry from entirely became known as the Daedra. The ruling castes claimed to be of Aedric descent as opposed to their Ehlnofey descended serfs, and it is a matter of debate whether their heritage lead to them being granted power or if they invented the notion in order to justify their rule through divine right. Whatever the case, nine tenths of the population changed from worshipping their own ancestors to worshipping the ancestors of the remaining tenth.

The growing power of the nobility meant that any heretical movements that could pose a threat to their claims of divine descent were forced to face exile or be exterminated. The most famous of such heretics are the Chimer, who considered the Daedra superior to the Aedra, and the Psijic Order, who kept to the "Old Ways" of ancestor worship.

Recently, the scholar Artorius Secundus has theorized that all divergent races of Mer were born out of such religious schisms. The Bosmer, he claimed, originated as a movement that claimed the Ehlnofey's sacrifice for the sake of their descendants made them more deserving of worship than the Aedra, and that this lead to the nature worship that found its extremes in the Green Pact. In addition, he interprets legends of Orgnum being exiled from Aldmeris for attempting to usurp Auri-El's role of King of the Aldmer as a dramatization of the banishment of a cult that worshipped a different supreme deity. The eclectic religion of the Ayleids he explained as the Ayleids being syncretics who thought all gods were worthy of worship, and credits the Nibenese tolerance for cults as being inherited from them. The Dwemer, of course, would be descended from those exiled for atheism. Although Artorious has been accused of blasphemy by the Altmeri clergy, his theories have become rather popular with the Temple Zero Society.