Nergal, Demiprince of Human Waste and Refuse

3E426

To Arch Primate Fidelus of Skingrad,

I hope this letter finds you well. I pray that the honorable men and woman of your chapel are in good spirits for the spring season; may Kyne bless us with the first fruits. I write to you out of scholarly duty. I had read an analysis among the Mages Guild’s regular publications that I thoroughly disagreed with; I checked for an author and found it to be none other than your esteemed person.

I have written a counterargument to some of the claims you made about the apocryphal mentions of the Demiprince Nergal and had them approved for publication by the College of Winterhold, but withheld my doing so for your approval on the matter, as well. Please, either publish it yourself, send it back with comments for publication by my hand, or send word for me to put a stop to its printing until we can speak on the matter in person.

May Jhunal bless you,

Magister Davrin Vvultag of Kynesgrove

Nergal, Lord of Waste and Refuse

Nergal (Nurgel, Nergul, or Nurghal) is thought to be illusory by most denizens of the Empire. It is commonplace for Imperial, Nordic, and Breton mothers alike to use his person to threaten small children who fail to finish less savory aspects of their meals. “If you don’t eat it, foul Nergal will be all the happier,” is a common saying in High Rock, but as the practice moves ever-eastward, so does its intensity. Mothers in Kynesgrove tell their children that if they waste even a morsel of food, Nergal will come into the house and feed on the child in its place. “Either you eat the horker loaf, or the horker loaf eats you!”

What these mothers are unaware of is that Nergal is likely a very-much real deity. His aspects have not been the subject of open worship since the middle of the First Era, but extensive records of summoning rituals, miracles, and sacrifices exist to this day. The respected Arch Primate Fidelus of Skingrad published an extensive review of existing information on the figure in Morning Star of last year, but I vehemently disagree with some of his interpretations on the evidence.

The Arch Primate held that Nergal was likely the scion of one of two Princes, Peryite or Namira, but could not dicern which because “the[ir] two spheres overlap to such an extent that it obscures the truth.” In truth, it is easy to see why one may choose one of these two Princes on which to put the blame, but likelihood does not equate to actuality.

As an apprentice know-it-all, I spent my time translating old Nedic script for the College of Winterhold into the common tongue. One such manuscript told of Nergal in direct conflict with a much more powerful Prince, Sanguine. It was the life story of an elderly Companion, Hulji Seven-Fingers, commissioned by his progeny. At one time, this Companion lived in what would eventually become Falkreath and witnessed a clash between two foul Princes.

The villagers had ceased their weeklong hedonistic escapade, ending on the infamous day of 16th of Sun’s Dawn. They annually celebrated the summoning day of the Prince of Debauchery with such festivities and in such a manner that even the Red-Horned Daemon would join in on the last day. That year, Sanguine, seemed to have taken the festivities to a new extreme, causing every member of the village (old and young alike) to blackout from inebriation. The Mead King (as he was known to the Nedes) slept off his stupor in absolute catatonia for three whole days amidst their number, with many of the townspeople joining him.

The issue was this- on the fourth day, a horrible smell began to arise from the refuse of half-empty stew pots and piles of deer bones. Flies began to swarm (which began to worry the villagers for Nergal’s animal was the fly) and small Daedra began to (quite literally) crawl out of the woodwork and nearby forests to descend on the villagers and their waste. The scamps and banekins posed small enough a danger for the villagers to deal with, but the people began to worry about the many ogrim coming in from the woods.

Hulji Seven-Fingers called out, begging for Sanguine to wake from his sleep. He began to jostle the demon, to no avail. He violently shook the Prince, and again the Prince slept. Villagers brought buckets of water to douse the Prince in, but still he slept. Hulji mentions in this part that he thought Sanguine had drank himself to death (ignorant, but amusing). Finally, a desperate young lad kicked the Prince in his “horker-skinned pouch”, jolting the Mead King from his rest.

Sanguine, to his credit, began fighting off the daedric invaders; but, rather than using his godlike powers, he resorted to drunken brawling. The language barrier for the next event makes it difficult to accurately describe. The ancient Nedes had a word to describe a humid, stagnant, miasma of thick, rolling fog that sometimes preceded tremendously disastrous calamities or, in this case, announced the arrival of a powerful and repugnant enemy. Nergal had taken the form of a nude, decomposing man “twice the height of a mammoth and four times as wide, whose liquids poured here and there as he trampled our fields and shook the ground beneath him.”

Sanguine appears to have sobered up considerably upon seeing Nergal, and a battle ensued. Nergal seems to not actively fight back during the next act of the story, merely focusing on making his way to the pile of scraps and garbage in the middle of the village. Sanguine tries to deter him in ways that must be embellishment on Hulji’s part; he ties ropes between Nergal’s legs, he puts a mammoth in between Nergal and the refuse, and he tries to offer him some mead.

The importance of this story lies here: all the while, Sanguine is yelling profanities at the approaching Nergal, “Ye smell worse than Herma Mora’s slimy arse!” “Ye have a face to make Orkey turn away!” while he battles him, but in the last effort that is made (the one that succeeds) he exclaims something interesting.

The way Sanguine successfully deters Nergal is simple- he summoned Glutton Ogrim to consume the scraps wholly before Nergal entered the village’s boundaries- a practical solution for a god that makes for less of a story and thus far more likely. The insult hurled at Nergal is thus: “This is my fault, children. His mother was a whore [sic] I * with my ** * beneath J’ffre’s ** trees. Prettiest thing, oh that she could come lay with me again. She’d be broken to know her son’s such a * *.” When translating for the first time, I used the derogatory term for prostitute, but the world’s oldest profession had not been seen in a negative light at the time, and insults to one’s father were much more cutting in the culture of the era. In addition, Sanguine mentions “J’ffre” who does not appear in any ancient Nordic pantheons. I take this statement from Sanguine to not only be relayed correctly through Hulji’s memoir, but an earnest statement on Sanguine’s part. The insult seems to be the latter portion, mentioning how something so foul came from something so beautiful.

After besting Nergal, Sanguine makes pact with the townspeople. They are to continue celebrations for one week after Sanguine’s departure each year, celebrating his defeat of Nergal, whom he calls “my drunken mistake.” In return, Sanguine will keep Nergal at bay. He also intimates that he will continue to fight Nergal by “ripping his old name from his new name from his old name from his new name.” It may seem the repetitive ramblings of a still-drunk god, but seen in the light of Shalidor’s proposed Nymic cosmology Sanguine might be suggesting outright deicide (inasmuch as a demiprince can die).

Whatever repercussions ensued from that night of revelry, Nergal has not been successfully contacted by a mage in some 800 years, and those mages who did parlay with the god those ages ago describe a confused and agonized deity. It seems that Sanguine’s crusade against his own son somehow succeeded. One can understand his natural animosity toward Nergal. Nergal isn’t the embodiment of filth as much as he is the natural end products of human living. Nergal is never associated with fungi or slugs as Namira is, but rather feces and scraps of food, things that indicate a human has spent time in the area. He signifies the “end of the party” when partygoers have eaten their fill and cannot consume any more, relieve themselves, or begin to regurgitate the much-too-many spirits they consumed. Sanguine would prefer that the festivities go on, but eventually every mortal begins to smell or has to relieve themselves and rest.

If Sanguine truly did manage to cut Nergal off from the Mundus, he is far more powerful than previously envisioned. If any Prince could easily do such a feat, one would assume that Meridia would have surely done away with one of Molag Bal’s many abhorrent Demiprince progeny in their millennia-long conflict. It perhaps supports some of Curate Davmen’s theories on hidden motives and abilities of the Prince of Debauchery; “of great powers but little want or need to use them” writes the Curate, “how jealous must Mephala be that Sanguine is regarded as harmless and given access to and fro.” The Curate, you may remember, died shortly after publishing those words when his throat was slit and his belly filled with spiders.

To all other matters concerning Nergal, I must concur with the Arch Primate’s article. Truly, his cataloging and interpreting the spread of Nergal worship throughout the Reach leaves little to be desired (and little to the imagination) and his account of the Green Disaster of Dorring, in which Nergal ate nearly half a city, is the pinnacle of historical work in this decade.

One last ironic observation- Sanguine has caused so many honest men to become drunken, violent fathers and yet here he is in this story, as drunken, violent, and neglectful as any he’s corrupted.

The Nine keep you and bless you always,

Magister Davrin Vvultag of Kynesgrove