Polymorphic Theology: A Programmer's Guide to Divinity.

I've been trying to understand this business of aspects of various divines. The conventional explanations use the concept of "oversouls", but without clear understanding of what an oversoul is, that may not be much help. I'd like to recast the problem into more familiar terms, and since my background is in software development, I'd like to extend the established Tal(OS) idea that gods can be considered in terms of software and attempt to break down the problem in terms of software development. I should add that I am not going to propose the meta argument that "the world is a computer game", but rather to construct an analogy between Our-World computer methodology and what the lore tells us about the mechanisms of worship in the setting of TES.

Aspects: On the face of it, aspects is a simple concept. The idea that different cultures might worship the same god under a different name seems straightforward enough. That they might used different ceremonies follows naturally and from there it's not too much of a stretch to imagine that the god in question might take on a different form for different forms of worship, or even behave a little differently. But then we get cases where God A is mainly an aspect of God B, but with bits of God C and elements of Deadric Prince D ... and suddenly the problem is not so simple.

And sometimes even the "same god, different name" analysis is problematic. In High Rock certain groups worship Sheor, the Bad Man. Which, according to UESP is a demonized version of Shor. So we don't just have an aspect here that behaves a little differently, we have one that appears to be pretty much the exact opposite of the original.

Oversouls: Now I know that we're supposed to understand this in terms of oversouls. Which is fine, except that I don't really understand what an oversoul is. I mean I'm fine with the Amulet of Kings having an oversoul of past emperors, since that sounds like all the past emperor's souls mashed together into one one big composite spiritual entity. And I'm reasonably happy with the Talos oversoul as a composite of Hjalti, Wulfarth and Zurin Arctus (or whoever it was). But when you apply that to divinity as a whole, well you end up with a cosmos where there are no gods as we understand them, but just a big ball of wibbly-wobbly diviney-winey stuff. And that doesn't seem particularly helpful.

Gods and Daemons: The idea that gods can be considered in terms of software is nothing new. Jubal in C0DA addresses Talos as Tal(OS) and calls him a virus. So having established my credibility here, let's see if we can extend the idea to divinity as a whole.

We can take inspiration from Unix based systems which have long used the term "demon" to describe autonomous software entities that operate behind the scenes performing tasks necessary to the proper functioning of the computer. If we extend that analogy back to Tamriel we find the gods as autonomous entities that operate (largely) behind the scenes and perform functions necessary to the proper functioning of the Universe. And just as operating system demons are hidden from the casual user, so are the workings of the divines hidden from the eyes or mortals. In both cases, directly interacting with these entities is difficult if not impossible in the vast majority of cases.

Aspects and APIs: In the case of a software entity, interactions are generally mediated via a predefined set of operations, often called an Application Programmer Interface, or API. I'd like to propose that the gods as most people in Tamriel understand the term are simply APIs to the underlying God Object which is essentially unknowable to anyone with a purely mortal perspective.

The interesting thing about that approach is that it's possible for a software entity to have more than one API, specialized to different tasks. The underlying functionality is unchanged, but the subset exposed to the user can be radically different. So different aspects of the same god are just different APIs that let you interact with the entity in different ways and perhaps to different purposes.

It's also possible (in software terms) to write software APIs that access more than one demon. You can write something that uses some functions from one subsystem and some from another and maybe some new code as well to bridge the gap. In these terms it is not so difficult to understand how some of the more complex multi-god aspects work. The only question is how do they come into being.

In the software world, the writing of new APIs the province in Programmers. In Tamriel, creating new interfaces to the gods is the business of Mytheopoeia. Now personally, I've never been comfortable with the notion of applying the Terry Pratchett/Small Gods model of worship to TES. Why did the Dwemer bother building Numidium if all they had to do was close their eyes and pretend really, really hard? There has to be more to it than simple belief. On the other hand, belief does also seem to play a role.

So to return to the example of Sheor, you can imagine how once convinced of Sheor's evil nature, some elements might then try to invoke this evil god and eventually find an API that let them access the more negative aspects of Lorkhan's personality. Over time, the API/method of worship is refined and eventually you end up with what seems to mortal eyes to be a separate entity offering a different range of services from the similarly named Shor.

Anyway, that's my attempt at imposing some structure on my understanding of divine aspects and mytheopoeia in Tamriel. I hope I've shown that we can imagine mytheopoeic forces in terms of software development, and that considering divines as part of some Cosmic Operating System works at least as well as some universal oversoul. And it they both have the effect of reducing all divinity of a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, diviney-winey stuff, well, at least we have another way to understand how that ball of stuff interacts with the lives of mortals.