Chorae: the wiki says "they belong to lost branch of sorcery called the Aporos." The branches of sorcery all take their names from Greek words. “Aporos” comes from the Greek word “Άπορος,” meaning “Destitute.” des·ti·tute- without the basic necessities of life.
I disagree on the source of the word Aporos. I think it comes from Aporia (ἀπορία: "impasse, difficulty of passing, lack of resources, puzzlement") which "denotes in philosophy a philosophical puzzle or state of puzzlement and in rhetoric a rhetorically useful expression of doubt."
Are Chorae Mini Versions of a perfect No-God? Do Chorae suck the very soul from Sorcerers leaving the dry husk of a body?
Im thinking the Inchoroi and the Aporos Quya made Chorae, told humans they were "godly" when they were just sole sucking grenades with a immune buff.
Centuries later The Consult (Humans and the Twins) try to make a Big Chorae or some device that the maybe does the same thing but as a storing device. Failing they ducted taped a couple Chorae on the Carapace, dusted theirs hands off and said "Good enough."
The Chorae Hoard is how Sakarpus managed to survive the First Apocalypse. The No-God circumvented it, saving his limited sorcerous resources to overcome the South.
One of the ideas behind anarcane ground simply follows the notion that the boundaries between the World and the Outside are variable. Some, taking the distinction between wakefulness and dreams as their analogy, believe anarcane ground to be Holy ground - places where the God has, for whatever reason, focussed his attention - dreams lucidly - thus rendering the co-option of his Song by sorcery difficult if not impossible.
Good questions, all. Personally, I've always worried that the Chorae may come across as too ad hoc, as mere narrative conveniences that allow a happy (but not very credible) balance between the sorcerous and the non-sorcerous. But in point of fact, that role came after - the Chorae developed independently. From the outset, I've looked at each of the sorcerous branches in linguistic terms, as practices where language commands, rather than conforms to, reality. So the Anagogis turns on the semantic power of figurative analogies, the Gnosis turns on the semantic power of formal generalizations, the Psukhe turns on speaker intention, and so on. And much as language undoes itself in paradoxes, sorcery can likewise undo itself. The Aporos is this 'sorcery of paradox,' where the meanings that make sorcery possible are turned in on themselves to generate what might be called 'contradiction fields.'
The Aporos is something I want to flesh out further in future books. The basic idea is this: the Quya first developed the Aporos in the prosecution of their own intercine wars, but it was quickly forbidden. The arrival of the Inchoroi allowed several renegade Quya to pursue their sorcerous interrogations, leading to the production of tens of thousands of Chorae, which were used throughout the Cuno-Inchoroi wars.
The Aporos possesses a contradictory, or negative, semantics, and as such is able only to undo the positive semantics of things like the Gnosis, Psukhe, Anagogis - even the Daimos. Aporetic Cants have no other effect. Salting is actually a kind of side effect. I would rather wait until TTT comes out before discussing the metaphysics - it has to do with the Mark.
I think the the root of all sorcery is semantics. It has nothing really, at heart, to do with the God, the God is simply another layer of semantics set on top. Kellhus' explanation in TTT is either him attributing things to the God, or is his attempt to mislead Akka (most probable).
I think what a Chorae does is unravels meaning. It is a paradox resolving paradox, which in-and-of itself is a paradox. It is a sink of meaning; where language gives positive semantics, a Chorae has negative semantics. It's nonsense, in the way which we fathom language, but in theory it could exist. If words could build meaning, then they could also destroy it.
I think that's the crux of it, not the Mark. In Earwa, the soul is the bearer of meaning, it is where what you have done is writ. So, once the Chorae undoes that meaning, the soul (the Greek phrenes, that is, the breathe of life) is unraveled and so discorporated in the process. The Mark only determines what happens to the body after. For those who are Marked, the disagreement if the Onta causes the body to salt. For Cishaurim, the soul simply exits and the body (who was not at odds with it) simply becomes one with the Onta.
I am definitely missing at least several somethings though. Akka describes the presence of a Chorae as a "dip in the Onta." So, perhaps it is that withdrawing of the Onta that is the real mechanism of it? Since both types of sorcery rely upon the Onta to work, perhaps also a sorcerer's bodies do too?
Thoughts?
