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Just some stray observations below, not sure what to make of them just yet:

Pg. 409 - 410
"And so life convulsed and life was expelled from the socket, drawn sheeted in blood from the suffocating real, the very muck of amniotic origin, and held exposed to the scrutiny of the cold Void, the hospice of prayer ... So that some essence might alight ... Some breath be drawn and screamed."

I think this alluding to souls entering the body at birth, specifically.

Pg. 415
"Light. Cold. Terror ... Breath. A convulsive wail of arrival ... Lost in the deluge of those departing."

The No-God has not yet resumed; a soul has entered the body of Akka and Mimara's son and it has been born.

Pg. 421 - 425
Unambiguous confirmation of the birth of the son. At this point, Kellhus has been fully subsumed by Ajokli ("[This] Is my place.")

On Page 422 we learn that there is a twin, and we know in hindsight that it will not live.

On Page 423, Malowebi spots Kelmomas threading his way towards Kellhus. On Page 426, we learn that the twin is a stillbirth. Now, I think it's safe to assume the scene in the Ark transpired quickly, with Kellhus being salted and Kelmomas tossed into the Ark, with the resumption beginning quickly enough to prevent the twin from receiving a soul. On Page 425, the Sranc "[crash] into impossible silence", which I believe indicates the rebirth of the No-God, and the stillbirth occurs after that.

Let's say Bakker was being cute with the "Kellhus is no baby" answer, I still don't see how Akka's son can possess Kellhus' soul as the body obtained its own soul prior to Kellhus being completely possessed by Ajokli, and especially if it really was Kellhus ('s soul) who uttered "K-Kel? How di-" (Pg. 443).

Then there's the line "What could not be grasped could not be broken" (Pg. 423) which appears after Ajokli/Kellhus declares "I am the Absolute", juxtaposed with Kellhus being salted after literally being grasped by a skin-spy holding a chorae.

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Author Q&A / Re: Unholy Consultation - *SUPER SPOILERIFIC*
« on: July 31, 2017, 06:24:19 pm »
I believe the Temple Prayer appears at least twice in this book -- does the line "Judge us not according to our trespasses / But according to our temptations" provide any meaningful insight into how salvation and damnation actually function in the world of the novels?

e.g. in the eyes of the gods, would you be better off as a reluctant prostitute than as a lustful but otherwise faithful husband?

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The Great Ordeal / Re: [TGO SPOILERS] Aorsi/Dagliash
« on: August 08, 2016, 09:15:18 pm »
As far as I feel compelled to comment on topic, and I think regurgitate many of my ARC discussion thoughts, I'd say that Kellhus didn't expect the Tekne artifact. Likewise, the Consult didn't expect that the Metagnosis would allow Kellhus to Sing away Dagliash and excavate the ruins of Nogaral from the Well of Viri. Probably the Consult hoped Kellhus and company would be beset at Dagliash long enough for the Tekne-Nuke to explode beneath ground and take them unawares, especially as a greater portion of the Ordeal would have been much closer to blast-radius (as the Ordeal's plan fixated on converging on Dagliash).

And as for Kellhus knowing what the "golden coffer" is going to do: all he has to do is recognize that there is a countdown and that he and anyone he still needs probably shouldn't be near it when it counts down (countdowns are bad, mmm'kay ;) ). After that, he can readily see what the consequences of the fallout are.
I read it as the Consult's Plan B. It doesn't make sense to me that they would throw away their nuke, their Sranc, and the army they had hidden in Viri all in one go -- seems more likely they were hoping the Ordeal would be defeated in battle, but if they were not, then the tekne-nuke was hidden under Dagliash to finish them off.

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The Great Ordeal / Re: (TGO Spoilers) Son of the Survivor
« on: July 27, 2016, 01:26:44 pm »
I thought the boy was just physical defective  (the crab hand) other then that he is just a untrained Dunyain.
Aaa, I read it as the crab hand having resulted from injury. Didn't catch that he was born that way.

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The Great Ordeal / Re: [TGO Spoilers] Kellhus
« on: July 26, 2016, 04:46:44 pm »
Kellhus' modus operandi since leaving Ishual has been absorbing and synthesizing the useful aspects of everything he encounters, whether it was individual people, the religious culture of the three seas, the sorcerous schools, the first Holy War, etc. I would be amazed if Kellhus didn't do the same with the Consult and the tekne - absorb, disintegrate, reintegrate - but I wouldn't say that's the same as him 'joining' the Consult or becoming the No-God.

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The Great Ordeal / Re: [TGO Spoilers] Kellhus
« on: July 26, 2016, 03:57:56 pm »
Achamian had that dream (or dreams) where people were being marched into what is presumably the NG sarcophagus.

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The Great Ordeal / Re: [TGO Spoilers] Kellhus
« on: July 26, 2016, 02:27:03 pm »
The qeuestion I don't really have an answer for is why does he need Proyas to "do what no believer could do?"  All I can think of is that he will renounce Kellhus, but I don't understand why that helps him.  Or is it that he wants him to do everything believing that Kellhus has really forsaken him.  In other words, no rely on him?
I read it as relating back to Chapter 4 and what Proyas believed about Kellhus, prophets, the gods, etc before Kellhus pulled the rug from under him. He needs someone who will make the right decisions, not the dogmatic "What Would (my fantasy of) Kellhus Do?" decisions. I think Kellhus knows things are about to get really really squirrely as they approach Golgotterath and he needs someone who will follow orders even if their faith is shaken.

As a side note, I realized just now that the reason "love" is so alien to the One God is because it's a measure of the distance between two people and therefore outside the Absolute.

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Has Mimara ever seen a 'pure' soul with her eye? Maybe everyone is damned.

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The Great Ordeal / Re: [TGO Spoilers] Explaining Koringhus
« on: July 24, 2016, 06:18:27 pm »
It comes up a few times that the gods are blind to the No-God. Koringhus says that the Absolute is behind the Judging Eye. So what if Mimara's Judging Eye is what will finally let the Absolute/Zero-God/One God "see" the No-God?

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The Great Ordeal / Re: [TGO Spoilers] Best bits of the Great Ordeal.
« on: July 24, 2016, 03:09:06 pm »
I was re-reading some of the Ishterebinth stuff today and I noticed that in the Boatman's songs, children are referred to as "spears" twice. First in the incest song, and again to describe the nonman king who sold them out for immortality.

Then I got to thinking that the Heron Spear is described as a powerful tekne weapon, which usually applied to creating fleshy/living abominations. The only other exception I could think of is the tekne nuke from TGO.

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The Great Ordeal / Re: [TGO SPOILERS] The Parts Appalling
« on: July 24, 2016, 12:04:00 am »
- the rape of Proyas. It was written so ambiguously - like Bakker was trying to trick us - that I wasn't even sure it physically happened until he told Saubon. And the fact that Kellhus did it not out of a sexual need but as a way to challenge Saubon - not Proyas - makes it even more twisted somehow.
Got some major Inchoroi vibes from this, too. They seem to enjoy sodomizing people.

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The Great Ordeal / Re: [TGO Spoilers] Explaining Koringhus
« on: July 23, 2016, 05:33:18 pm »
I should finish analyzing those last few excerpts but the more I think about them the more I'll have to cull other intratextual references to tie it all together, and my brain is a little melty right now between binging on TGO and catching up on real-world stuff.

I probably shouldn't put too much stock in a flavor text philosopher like Ajencis, but he seems to suggest that 'Damnation' (and maybe Salvation, if there IS a heavenly plane -- I don't think we've seen as much concrete evidence for that as we have for Hell) is what happens when your  soul is intercepted on its way out of the World. Maybe it's such that faith in one of the many gods is like gratifying a narcissist, and unless you appease them, they don't intervene to save your soul from being sucked up by demons. Maybe all otherworldy beings (gods & demons) function like the No-God and indiscriminately vacuum up souls before they can reach the Absolute -- in which case authentic salvation is joining the Absolute, not being caught in the pocket dimension of some God. Was Koringhus' leap a "sideways step" around the Gods and demons the way the Judging Eye is a sideways step around Logos?

And then how does the Judging Eye work, exactly? It's the eye of the Absolute, at least according to Koringhus, but does that mean the Absolute is the "cubit" against which morality is measured? If yes then where do the other gods like Yatwer factor in?

The theology is so opaque. I wonder if the World was actually peachy-keen in prehistory and the Inchoroi are like a Typhoid Mary that brings Damnation with them wherever they go.

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The Great Ordeal / Re: [TGO Spoilers] Overall thoughts on the book?
« on: July 23, 2016, 05:03:44 pm »
and those anti-dunyain thralls they bred
Could you elaborate, please? It's about emwame servile behaviour or there is something else I've completely missed? Thanks in advance!
"anti-dunyain" was a poor choice of words, I think. I just meant that on the one hand you have the Dunyain who, through selective breeding, have advanced their intellect and physical abilities to superhuman levels, while on the other you have the Emwame, who I think were also deliberately bred, who are squat, servile and stupid.

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The Great Ordeal / Re: [TGO Spoilers] Overall thoughts on the book?
« on: July 23, 2016, 02:44:51 pm »
The endless sranc killing didn't bother me so much as I thought the emphasis was sufficiently on the psychological impact of the endless slaughter, and I liked how the supernatural is creeping in a bit more as they get closer to Golgotterath.

The only two gripes I have are Kelmomas and the Ishterebinth sections that focused on the descent down the well. Kelmomas is annoying the way Ramsay Snow Bolton was annoying in the last season of Game of Thrones -- I won't feel any happiness or schadenfreude when he dies, I'll just be glad to not have to read about him anymore. He reads like a stock sociopath/"evil" character from a less inspired novel series and I'm bored by him. And those aforementioned Ishterebinth sections just reminded me too much of Cil-Aujas, although I liked seeing more of nonman society and those anti-dunyain thralls they bred were a neat idea.

Also I'm annoyed that Theliopa was killed off. I thought she was neat.

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The Great Ordeal / Re: [TGO Spoilers] The Gods
« on: July 22, 2016, 08:46:21 pm »
Still getting used to this forum's peculiarities, sorry. I'll just repost the relevant Bakker quote from above.
Quote
Everything comes down to meaning in Eärwa. Where sorcery is representational, utilizing either the logical form (as with the Gnosis) or the material content (as with the Anagogis) of meaning to leverage transformations of reality, the Psukhe utilizes the impetus. Practitioners of the Psukhe blind themselves to see through the what and grasp the how, the pure performative kernel of meaning–the music, the passion, or as the Cishaurim call it, the ‘Water.’ As a contemporary philosopher might say, the Psukhe is noncognitive, it has no truck with warring versions of reality, which is why it possesses no Mark and remains invisible to the Few.

Does this give us a clue as to why Meppa was left alive? Psukhe sounds analogous to this definition of the No-God he supplied in a Q&A (can't find the original source; took it from the wiki):
Quote
A better way to think of the No-God is as a philosophical zombie (p-zombie) . . .  A perfectly unconscious god, and so in that respect, entirely at one with material reality, continuous with it, and so an agency invisible to the Outside.

A noncognitive sorcery and an unconscious God.

Or maybe semiotics is a better lens to use.
Gnosis = signifier, Agogis = signified, and Psukhe = ... I don't know. The unconscious act of meaning-making? But to me, that suggests its the magic the Absolute, the darkness that comes before. If that were the case, I would expect them to not be effected by chorae or damned the way the gnostic and agogic sorcerers are.

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