Mythopoeia

In keeping with the week's theme, I'd like to ruminate a little on Mythopoeia.

The term comes from the Greek for "myth making". Originally used to refer to the way ancient cultures created their mythologies, it was picked up by JRR Tolkein who found it described his intentions in writing about Middle Earth. Of course, in the TES world, mythopoeia is used to refer to the business of creating and altering gods rather than myths. I find there's a bit of a mismatch there. Kagrenac clearly didn't make Wraithguard, Sunder and Keening so he could write some Lorkhan fan-fiction; for him, mythopoeia constituted a major engineering project. So why use this particular word?

The easiest thing, of course, is simply to discount the discrepancy and say "this is how the word is used in TES", and that's fair enough. But just for the fun of it, I want to see if I can connect the dots and travel from Tolkien's use of the word to Kagrenac's. To do that, I want to look at another fantasy world with some very close ties to that of TES, and to consider how these mechanisms might play out if we could use them in our world before finally trying to tie it all together.

What Is A "Myth" If Myths Really Happened?

The first hurdle we need to overcome is the "myth" part of the concept. Myths, in our world at least, are by definition things that did not happen, and so any attempt to manipulate them is necessarily a work of fiction. Of course, the key phrase there is "in our world". But if myths are real, we have to ask what separates them from simple ancient history.

Glorantha

In order to answer that, I want to make a short detour here and talk about another game world: Glorantha. Glorantha was the setting for the P&P RPG RuneQuest, RuneQuest was published by Chaosium and both MK and Ken Rolston worked for Chaosium before coming to Bethesda. In his AMA, MK said this on the subject:

> The second biggest influence in the structure of TES' mythos would be the mighty, mighty Glorantha. Hands down, the best mythology in games.

And the influence shows. You could pick up Lie Rock and the Ghostfence and put them down in Glorantha and they wouldn't look at all out of place. Glorantha also has a very similar concept of Time to that used in TES. In particular it has a time-before-time called the Dreamtime where time is non-linear and where the gods act directly, and the linear time that most of its inhabitants experience is a somewhat fragile compromise hammered out by the gods. The Dreamtime is the mythic time and the nature of the gods inside Time is determined by their actions outside of Time.

Mythopoeia In Glorantha

The reason I mention this is that in Glorantha the process of mythopoeia (in the TES sense of the word) is fairly well understood. It's possible through ritual to enter the Dawntime which is always happening outside of time, and take part in the events of myth. Change the events of Dawntime and you change the relationship between mortals and the divine, maybe only in a small way at first, of course. To make larger changes you need the support of lots of people and some structured ritual ... and of course, that's how religions are born.

An "Our-World" Example

I have to admit, I struggled to understand how this might work from a practitioner viewpoint. What I found helpful was to imagine how it might work in our world. For instance: suppose you could travel back to the Garden of Eden. Let's say you have a portal in your house that takes you back to that time. Maybe you could talk to God and persuade him to grant you a special exemption from the Original Sin. Maybe permission to use the forbidden magical arts that the Church has long suppressed.

So you make your deal and return back to the present only to find that there has been a secret Vatican organization dating back in one form or another to the dawn of time, and which has been dedicated to preserving the secrets of black magic for the day that you return from the Garden. The day and the hour have been foretold (possibly because you mentioned it back in the Garden) and there are some people waiting at your door to teach you all you need to know to weild the power usually reserved for God and His Angels. Nothing has changed, and everything has changed. (Just don't tell Dan Brown! ;))

What It Means For Tamriel

And that, more or less, is how I think mythopoeia works in Tamriel. You find a Dragon Break, or you project your mind through the Dreamsleve or you make a sound so clear and pure that it can be heard outside Time. But somehow you effect a change in Dawntime and then, looking back at it from inside time you find that the landscape of Divinity has changed, maybe just a little. It might be a comparatively subtle thing such as enabling a form of Worship that reinterprets the Mercy of Stendar as vicious and bloody intolerance. Or you might be able to do what Vivec did and go cavorting all over the Mythic Landscape and write yourself in as a whole new god. Or you could take Kagrenac's approach and make a great big machine with a tremendous energy source to drive it and try and brute force the whole bloody thing. (And if anyone's interested, the Dwemer are a good match for Glorantha's God Learners, both in their contempt for Divinity and their eventual fate).

In Conclusion

Anyway, that's how I understand Mythopoeia. A means of directly influencing Dawntime events in order to affect the behaviour of the gods, thereby enabling new aspects and new means of worship, and possibly the creation whole new deities from the ground up.

Thank you for reading.

[edit]

Added some headings, improved the wording in a few places.