[Apocrypha] On the Nature of Jyggalag and Sheogorath

This is intended to be an alternate theory on the nature of the duality between Jyggalag and Sheogorath to the canon one. It slightly alters the nature of the Greymarch. It is a piece by a daedric scholar who is considered unorthodox at best.

At the heart of this essay lies Jyggalag's impulsive need to form logical arguments and his fear that orderly civilisation contained the seeds of its own destruction. In particular, Jyggalag came to fear that the concept of reason which had animated his old aspirations for aeons was essentially self-destructive. This came from observations by Jyggalag and his Priests of Order that the closer they came to achieving absolute order, the stronger the remaining chaos resisted, thus making absolute order unachievable. According to this view, the horrors of the Greymarch were not ‘detours’ from the general progress towards order, but were the only natural culmination of this whole process. The recent descent into barbarism was the outcome not of the defeat of reason but of the indefatigable self-destructiveness of enlightenment. Reason was therefore inherently irrational; order culminates in chaos. If this was true, however, then Jyggalag's yearning for a perfectly structured and orderly society became not simply improbable but anachronistic as well. Therefore the only solution to this quandary was an infinite reset that would be triggered on a regular basis; the Greymarch. The only other requirement was that Jyggalag himself would dedicate time towards pursuing not only order, but chaos as well. As this was anathema to his universal impulse, this culminated in a paradox. Jyggalag was splintered into two mirror images; one of order, one of chaos, the Greymarch the eternal barrier between the two. Henceforth, the Greymarch was both the solution to Jyggalag’s desire for logical reasoning, by completing his theory that order is self-destructive, and the event which destroys him by dismantling reason and order itself.

Sheogorath’s task, then, if he wished to end the Greymarch and become his own independent entity, was to confront the concept of rationality that underlay Jyggalag’s aspirations and convince him that it was incorrect. For help in this enterprise, he turned to the thoughts of two others for whom irrationality was the only truth. The first of these became the Duke of Mania, the entity in whom ecstasy reached its apogee. The second was the Duke of Dementia, the arch-critic of ecstasy. In time, he believed, their persistent dedication to concepts that were antithesis to rationality would destroy Jyggalag through his inability to comprehend them and his dedication to creating a feasible explanation for everything which he did not understand. The peculiar difficulty of Sheogorath's task was to avoid the obsessive absolutism of Mania while simultaneously steering clear of the nihilism of Dementia. In this task, many would say, he has failed. The split between Mania and Dementia has permeated every corner of the Isles, even its flora and fauna – and, some would say, the mind of the Mad God himself. The only place that remains untouched, a pure bastion of madness, is the Fringe, where all those who are truly, dedicatedly mad remain.

Excerpt from "The True Nature of the Daedric Planes: The Shivering Isles" by Baltis Uveran