I still think that the Inverse Fire should be treated with a degree of suspicion.

The Inverse Fire seems like a huge self-fulfilling prophecy: everyone who looks into it sees themselves damned because seeing yourself damned will inevitably cause you to pursue actions that will damn you. Bakker even tells us outright in TUC that that was the whole point of it: to keep the Inchoroi and those they recruited utterly devoted to the cause of their Progenitors. It is entirely possible that (at least in some cases) if you never looked into the IF you would not have been damned.

And (AFAIK) the only evidence we really have for Nonman Oblivion being a lie is the Inverse Fire.

There is also the possibility that Oblivion sidesteps damnation in a way that simply cannot show up in the IF. In other words, looking into the IF and seeing yourself damned does not preclude you from avoiding that by finding Oblivion. In the same way that it does not preclude the No-God saving you from damnation by closing the World.

So the tragedy might be that Mekeritrig and his two companions were wrong, and that they damned themselves and their race right there in the Golden Room.

I actually wonder if the Progenitors would ever have been damned themselves if they hadn't started exploring their souls and peering into the Outside in the first place. Could ignorance of the very existence of the Outside protect you from damnation?

So...dragons have dicks too?
Thats a new one.

I'm pretty sure all the Weapon Races do. Even female sranc seem to be so endowed (it's stated in the EG that "no outward physical differences are readily visible" between male and female sranc unless the females are pregnant).

There is still a problem with Kellhus closely scrutinizing the Dunsult and seeing them as Dunyain. He pretty much should've seen inconsistencies in their behavior if they were Compelled or under unusual strain (like sharing Shauriatas's soul among them). For example, Kellhus was able to see the illusion of Shauriatas as an illusion without ever meeting him.

Seeing through fake-Shauriatas would have been ridiculously easy for either Kellhus or Ajokli, though, even if highly distracted. The real Shauriatas would have been deeply Marked. And we know from later on when Akka first sees fake-Kellhus that the holographic projector cannot replicate the Mark.

I'm still not sure how Sujara Nins armor worked?

Seems to play around with gravity, or perhaps momentum, redirecting those around it to literally fall directly away from it.

He also called him "Cunny"........that would make me wonder if Emilidis was a woman but he couldn't be because of the Womb Plague right?

Uh... no, the dragon was just boasting that he'd fucked Emilidis. To the Weapon Races, pretty much everything is Cunny.

The Gods' greatest joke: former certainties viewed through the lens of more recent revelation.

I wonder if that's a cypher for the series. The Gods constantly going "Ha! You believed that last Prophet we sent you? Now you're all damned. Now here's a new Prophet with a new line of 'revelation' that smells even sweeter than the last. Consume it and you will be saved. We really mean it this time, Charlie Brown!"

(Also, this thread's title has to be read in Brian Blessed's voice.)

Sure you can say that, to Earwa and its ignorant inhabitants, that there is no distinction of physical reality and 'metaphysics' (soul, sorcery, gods, etc.)

No, I'm saying the distinction flat-out makes no sense when talking about Earwa. (There is a related distinction that does make sense: that between the World as the God wills it and that alternative version of reality created by sorcery and hence bearing the Mark.)

I obviously didn't explain my point very well, because the problem isn't merely that we're looking at things differently to how Earwans would, but that we're looking at things differently from how Earwa is. The lack of distinction between the physical and the metaphysical is not due to ignorance on the Earwans' part.

People here appear to be drawing the dividing line between what would be real in our world and what would be impossible in our world, ignoring the fact that both are equally 'real' in Earwa. That makes no sense to me. It feels just the same as when people try to explain things like the owlbear from D&D in terms of evolution by natural selection, or try to work out the chemical composition of wildfire from aSoIaF. If an alchemist from our own Europe's mediaeval period tells us something is 'magic', we know he's wrong; when Hallyne the Pyromancer says the same thing, we've no logical reason to doubt him and assuming he is wrong because of how stuff works in our world is a logical error.

We have the ability to see the whole picture as it exists within Earwa.

That statement seems completely at odds with how Bakker writes. I don't think we ever see "the whole picture". I think filling in the 'gaps' with how things would be in our world is a mistake.

our privileged perspective and using it to figure out what is really happening in Earwa.

I can't agree that we have a "privileged perspective". I think, if anything, we readers know far, far less about how Earwa works than its inhabitants do.

Afterall, there would be almost nothing left to talk about if everyone here had that view.

Obviously I disagree with this, otherwise I'd not be here.

I can grok this, Duskweaver - but clearly the World is mundane in some senses (read: comparable to our flerwed anachronist projections).

As I pointed out above, the more meaningful distinction appears to be between the World as the God wills it (or originally created it) and that which bruises the Onta. If you want to use the word 'mundane', I would suggest using it for the former. But anarcane ground is no less 'metaphysical' than anywhere else in Earwa. Does that make sense?

Everyone might have a connection the Outside but not everyone is affected in life by that connection, right?

To say someone is "unaffected in life" by their own soul seems nonsensical to me.

and we know from the TUC Ch. 1 Excerpt that the division is tricky - clearly some aspects of cognition don't in fact carry over to your experience of soul later, marking an uneasy distinction between mind and soul again).

Hmm... I'm going to have to reread.

Seems like there are implications here for the damnation or otherwise of amnesiac Nonmen?

Speaking of which, I've had the strange thought bouncing around in my head lately that the amnesia of the Erratics might have originally been intentional, devised as a method of "hiding their Voices".

Anyway, I think it'd be helpful if people defined their terms (my inner Confucian is rearing its head again ). What exactly do you guys mean when you say 'mundane', 'psychological', 'soul', 'mind', 'metaphysical', etc. in the context of discussing how Earwa works.

*Psst* I heard Madness ate Nerdanel's liver with fava beans and a nice Chianti.

I know I don't usually do this, but I'd like to give a big +1 to dragharrow's entire post.