My current interpretation is, basically, God is Love.
Yeah, I know. But it does actually make sense and throws a whole bunch of stuff into a new lens.
It's more like a very Darwinian Mother Earth god, which is both transcendent and immanent.
Basically, Koringhus came upon the realization that one of the Dunyain's greatest flaws was "denying the interval between themselves". In other words, they removed passion from themselves to the extent they couldn't experience familial love between parents and children. This is what the boy was "defective" for -- he couldn't deny the interval between himself and his father. Nor could Koringhus do so with his son.
The Sranc become an important metaphor. We see how, en masse, the Sranc begin to function as one thing (the Shroud) instead of many. Koringhus sees that to reach the Absolute, one must simply stop conceiving themselves as "separate from the whole".
All of this tied very directly into the "circuit of watcher and watched". In Earwa, time is more like a rock than a river. Everything has already happened, was always going to happen, etc. I don't think any character or being is capable of changing this -- even the Gods. They can screw around with events in the meantime, but the ends are always same no matter, because the "end" is The Absolute. However, in Earwa, things do not quite exist unless they are WITNESSED. Koringhus hints at this as well. The Earwaverse is basically guaranteed to end in the recollection of the Many into the Whole, Zero-Goddess/Absolute -- which then looks back upon the disparate strands of itself, the "darkness that came before", effectively creating itself.
I suspect that, very early on, the Nonmen were an offshoot of men that worshiped the Ground, while Men worshiped the Sky and/or Sun. Or, conversely, Nonmen were a group of men that evolved into a nocturnal lifestyle, thereby "naturally" worshiping the Ground and Moon. The exact order is open for debate, but it makes a lot sense for the Nonmen's whole style, especially once we realize that earth-ground-nature-oblivion are sort of connected here as being the primordial state of things. Nonmen are pretty clearly a riff on a number of "fairy" folklore, and therefore a strong connection with nature, night, and femininity. Go back and read the description of Onkis now:
Onkis is the Goddess of hope and aspiration. One of the so-called Compensatory Gods, who reward devotion in life with paradise in the afterlife, Onkis draws followers from all walks of life, though rarely in great numbers.
She is only mentioned twice in the Higarata, and in the (likely apocryphal) Parnishtas she is portrayed as a prophetess, not of the future, but of the motivations of Men. The so-called “shakers” belong to an extreme branch of the Cult, where the devotees ritually strive to be “possessed” by the Goddess. Her symbol is the Copper Tree (which also happens to be the device of the ancient Nonman Mansion of Siöl, though no link has been established).
Onkis is also called the Singer-in-the-Dark.
Her idol depicts the severed head of a beautiful woman upon a copper tree.
And her description in the text:
“The idol worked in white marble, eyes closed with the sunken look of the dead. At first glance she appeared to be the severed head of a woman, beautiful yet vaguely common, mounted on a pole. Anything more than a glance, however, revealed the pole to be a miniature tree, like those cultivated by the ancient Norsirai, only worked in bronze. Branches poked through her parted lips and swept across her face—nature reborn through human lips. Other branches reached behind to break through her frozen hair.”
Bunch of stuff starting to slip together, yeah?
Either way, at some point, Men or Nonmen (perhaps unintentionally) fucked it all up. I'm not sure if the "ritual of the Hundred" we hear the Boatman talk about is meant to be taken literally, but it could be. However, I have a strong feeling that the splitting of the Zero-Goddess came as a result of sentience (and also language, which I suspect in Earwa biology are one in the same). The Hundred Gods feed on conscious entities -- the soulless provide no sustenance. However, all of the most popular gods -- and thereby most powerful -- have a pretty sensible hierarchy based on their "proximity to the Zero-Goddess".
Yatwer is at the top of the chain, because ultimately you can't have life without birth (just one reason the Inchoroi are so fucked).
Gilgaol, naturally, comes right after, since War -- or more simply, Death -- is part of the natural equation here.
I don't think Yatwer actually IS the Zero-Goddess, she's just the closest. The reason death comes so close after her is because they symbolize the "split" most acutely.
Also, check out the Kabbalah concept of Tzimtzum for a pretty straightforward explanation of the Zero-God thing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TzimtzumBecause the tzimtzum results in the "empty space" in which spiritual and physical Worlds and ultimately, free will can exist, God is often referred to as "Ha-Makom" (המקום lit. "the Place", "the Omnipresent") in Rabbinic literature ("He is the Place of the World, but the World is not His Place"[2]). In Kabbalistic interpretation, this describes the paradox of simultaneous Divine presence and absence within the vacuum and resultant Creation. Relatedly, Olam — the Hebrew for "World/Realm" — is derived from the root עלם meaning "concealment". This etymology is complementary with the concept of Tzimtzum in that the subsequent spiritual realms and the ultimate physical universe conceal to different degrees the infinite spiritual lifeforce of creation. Their progressive diminutions of the Divine Ohr (Light) from realm to realm in creation are also referred to in the plural as secondary tzimtzumim (innumerable "condensations/veilings/constrictions" of the lifeforce). However, these subsequent concealments are found in earlier, Medieval Kabbalah. The new doctrine of Luria advanced the notion of the primordial withdrawal (a dilug - radical "leap") in order to reconcile a causal creative chain from the Infinite with finite Existence.
Go back and read Koringhus's death scene now. Consider how his time spent in the darkness, deep in the Earth, prepared him for this revelation -- and how his son was
reared in that darkness.
I actually there's some intentional humor here. All the wars, all the faiths and gods and aliens, are missing the point because it's so damn simple. Koringhus is barely outside Ishual for a few weeks, figures everything out, does some drugs and jumps off a cliff -- into the empty arms of Nature.
However, I think Kellhus knows this truth very well, and has been playing his entire game according to it. Those first pangs of emotion way back in PON weren't for nothing. In fact, the idea of a Primordial, feminine nature goddess makes a whole bunch of sense if we view Kellhus as a sort of Positive Satanic Figure (especially if he is, in fact, Ajokli -- the Adversary of the Gods).
I could keep going here because there's a shitload to talk about with this revelation (Mimara and the Judging Eye, Cnaiur and the Scylvendi's weird non-religion, the Inchoroi as a "Race of Lovers"), but the post is already a bit on the large side and I'm still brewing over things.
