On Divinity
What is interesting is that according to Shant Karotu texts, supposedly the Prince of Darkness, that is, the chy-Duinnedh, showed the Silent Sage how to find the Path of Wisdom through shamt. This has aroused great debate as the chy-Duinnedh should be incapable of escape from Ladocs.
We will explore the several supposed cases of mortals achieving divinity.
Shant Karotu follows the teachings of the Silent Sage, a semi-mythical figure alleged to have lived in the second century BCA around the eastern Davanian plain. He is held by Shant Karotus to have been the first to discover shamt, a sort of state of self-actualisation or apotheosis that results in oneness with the universe and detachment from the self, a mantling of the divinity. Shamt is thought to be the right hand path, subsuming one’s self into the all. The Silent Sage is unique in that he is taken to have been the first, and possibly only, figure to achieve divinity through the right hand path. By this, meaning the obliteration of the self, it can be said that he really never existed at all, individually or egotistically, retroactively obliterated from record and ledger save for silent echoes and images that ripple outwards from the point of apotheosis.
Perhaps the most interesting case is that of Erizur Saeluek and Hair of Tunis. These two are presented within the same section because their ascensions seem to be at least connected, if they are not simply the same figure.
Erizur Saeluek was born into a minor noble family in the late Tarshan Algarinate around 1940 CA. Little is known about his early life, but he was clearly interested and talented in magic. According to legend, his mother tricked a djinn into taking her to the full moon, where she gave birth to Erizur.
Haír of Túnis was born the same year as Erizur’s disappearance and supposed mantling. This alone would not be cause to believe in a connection to Erizur, but the nature of his life and works leave little room for doubt. Erizur was an extremely skilled magus, and he would dedicate the later part of his life exploring the nature of the universe, publishing his famous work The Planes, still one of the most preeminent works on the subject to this day. At the end of his life he became most famous for what would earn him the epithet “the Sealer”, as he began to see the extraterritorial planes as a threat to the mundane material. While not the first to hold this idea or one similar (the Feywild had been burned down centuries prior), his private journals indicate his reasons weren’t pragmatic ones, but deeply metaphysical ones.
While the Burning had been accomplished by a small college of powerful mages opening a rift in the Feywild to the plane of elementary fire, the Sealing was an entirely different thing. In order to accomplish such a feat would require divinity, and so, Erizur mantled divinity in order to accomplish this task. What happened next is controversial, but I contend he felt his work was not yet complete, but that he needed to be again within the confines of mortality, and so he was incarnated as Hair of Tunis.
For millennia the name Furana was forgotten, only to be revived by a man born when Erizur died. Comparing the writings of Hair to those of the private journals of Erizur reveals very different writing styles (and indeed different languages), but similar ideas. Erizur felt men and the mortal realm had been tricked.
While Erizur seemed to pursue the left hand path, Hair certainly followed the right. Furanism advocates a return to oneness with Furana, subsuming the self into the all. Furana may be real, as described by Hair, or she may represent the path to oneness.
It is interesting though by no means abnormal that the two largest religions seemingly concerned with apotheosis, Shant Karotu and Furanism, both lean towards the right hand path, that of community, of oneness. The left hand path, the subsuming of the all into the I being the realm of individuals seeking personally. Furanism and especially Shant Karotu are suffused with the idea of the eternal return and cycles, and the right hand path represents the largest cycle, all eventually coalescing back into Oneness that the cycle begins anew to break into ever smaller cycles, divinity being the cycle itself. The left hand path is often thought of as the true “mantling”. While the right hand seeks to rebuild the wheel, the left seeks to shatter it fully and completely
That the Prince of Darkness, the chy-Duinnedh, were able to show the Silent Sage of Shant Karotu the sacred word of shamt shows that they are not as bound as we would be led to believe
All religions begin with the same concept. From the long-dead elves past even the most distant memory, all contend the start was Oneness. Ladocs, as it is called, was the world seed, or world egg, contending all the possible and impossible, and without time.
Shamt can be a link between the self and the all. To understand shamt, to truly hear its silence, one must already have linked the self and the all, they must lose distinction before they can hear shamt and be pulled along the right hand path to divinity
According to the traditions of the long-dead elves, in the beginning there was only the the many-faced idiot god Ladocs, who contained within itself all possibilities. From Ladocs was spawned Sianor (Janor), Chyila (Scilla), and Bheiþë (Veis), the dha-Duinnedh, or out-worlders, which Shant Karotu would later interpret as the three faces of the Father of Greatness, Idea (or Imago), Water, and Wisdom, respectively. These three escaped to the unbound space outside Ladocs. From the ruptured remains of Ladocs were born Hano (Heno), Garë (Gar), Priswys (Presis), Mõer (Mare), and Abhal (Avalis), the chy-Duinnedh, or in-worlders, or in Shant Karotu, the Prince of Darkness, daemon, dragon, eagle, fish, and lion. Abhal, originally misery, suffering, and compassion, would bear Siall Ànhan (Jellenus) alone.
From the decaying remains of Ladocs, rotten from the inside out and vacuous, was fashioned the world. Ladocs is both the world, and its dead architect. For this, it is often referred to as the blind idiot god. Both the escaped dha-Duinnedh and the bound chy-Duinnedh are still faces, aspects, or pieces of Ladocs. They serve as the split will and manifestations of Ladocs. Ladocs is both the mother and the egg, while the gods are the chick and the implications of what an egg is to become. Ladocs contains time, and so is mother before the egg, the incubating egg, and the rotting shell after hatching, and this is what creates time and possibility, while the gods exist outside this paradigm but are still bound to it. It was the chy-Duinne, though, that would fashion the carcass of Ladocs into what it would become. The first, second, and third generations were all immortals, but then would come the mortals. There is a great deal of debate over the causes of mortality.
The ultimate test of will is the mantling of Ladocs, to escape from its carcass and into the divine realm of kenoma. Few have ever been claimed to have accomplished such a feat, with Erizur Saeluek (Erizır Sälüek), the Sealer being the most widely accepted to have done so, earning him a spot among the gods as a figure of worship for some.
To mantle Ladocs is to understand the wheel, Samsara, and to escape it. While mortals and those trapped inside Ladocs see only along the wheel, they see a great “I”, a linear line, as it rolls overhead and crushes them, bringing them back to the top only to go underneath yet again. To escape is to see the wheel as it is from the side, a great circle. This mantling can be thought of as a physical mantling of the wheel to escape from its eternal rolling, but as the wheel is metaphysical, so is the effort. There are three methods of this mantling, one through each of the dha-Duinne, those outside Ladocs. The path of Idea, that of Sianor, is unknown. Supposedly none have mantled this way. The path of Water, that of Scilla, is supposedly that taken by Bogov, while that of Veis, Wisdom, is the most common.
It may seem contradictory, but the IS are the DO-NOT, and the IS-NOT are the DO, as the IS are being and so DO-NOT, while the IS-NOT are becoming, and so DO. So, it makes sense that it was the chy-Duinne that would reveal to the Silent Sage shamt, as the becoming
The Elves
The fate of the elves is uncertain, and competing theories exist. The most authoritative source on the matter is the Dwarven Chronicle, a chronicle kept by the Berttenokru clan that survives in fragments beginning about 800 years after the supposed disappearance of the elves. The dwarves themselves have little idea or care for what happened to them, despite the fact they were contemporaries.
Pneumatic Theory
Bogov contends that the dwarves are entirely autochthonous, and made rather than born (there are no undisputed records of female dwarves) This makes them essentially hylics, properly material and incapable of escape or understanding outside the carcass of Ladocs and the material, while the elves were pneumatics, bound for escape, and man and the other “middle races” are psychics, capable of transformation into matter or spirit. The dwarves, choosing to live in the earth
False Image Theory
The so-called False Image theory posits that there never were any physical elves, and that the material culture left behind was that of the refracted Imago left behind when Janor became the first to leave.
There have been through history several
- Bogov the Magnanimous, 1st century, left hand path
- The Silent Sage, 3rd century, right hand path
- Uzholch, 9th century, right hand path
- Smaragdina Event, 11th century, right hand path
- Erizur Saeluek, 1986, left hand path
- Haír of Túnis, 2060, right hand path
- Black Dawn Triumvirate, 2253, partial left hand path
- Members of the High Varani Arcanum, 2620, left hand path?
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