[What Came Before]

Can't recall where we were discussing Sil's symbol.
I related it to Ajokli's designation as the four horned brother, and made mention of the fact that he is described by some as Gierra's faithless husband.
I noticed that Gierra's symbol is two snakes (tatooed on Esmenet's wrist in imitation of Gierra's priestesses) - again, this is a component of Sil's symbol.
Co-incidence?  Yeh, probably.

I thought that a thread to discuss this and the hundred in general might be an idea though.

For instance, they seem to traverse a broad compass of moral alignment. 
Onkis is described as goddess of forgiveness and compassion.  (One extreme)

Yatwer seems quite convincingly on the darker side of 'giving', demonstating the rarity/falsity of true altruism.

Gilgaol is a force of bloody chaos (and Cnaiur has probably kicked his arse and taken his throne by now )

Ajokli, god of lies and trickery - is he evil? who knows...  certainly sounds like a patron or an outside ally for Kellhus.
I mean, if AK can step outside and collect some ciphrang noodles for show, what is to stop him dropping into Ajokli's sub reality to try and cut a deal?

[What Came Before]

Can't recall where we were discussing Sil's symbol.

Is there a consensus on what exactly it looks like? Because this

(click to show/hide)

is what I got from RSB's description, but I'd be the first to admit my conception of a lot of things in these books is coloured by the influence of Warhammer in my younger days (hence it looks like the sigil for a Keeper of Secrets - i.e. a daemon of lust). :oops:

The most interesting thing about Ajokli, to me, is his ability to "see what the other (gods) do not see", and that the others shun him and the Tusk condemns his cult for that reason (as stated by the Narindar in tWLW).

Can Ajokli see the No-God?

[size=85]EDIT: Pic spoilerblocked for hugeness.[/size]

[What Came Before]

Welcome Dusk, glad to see another forum goer. Believe me Warhammer is not the nerdiest thing round hear, not by a long shot, so don't worry about it.
btw that pic of the sigil is actually exactly what someone else posted a month or two ago (which is the topic Cruethan was referring too).

I'll try to dig up that topic.
Edit:
Found it. It was in the misc. chatter forum under t-shirt ideas. page 2.
http://secondapocalypse.forumer.com/t-shirt-ideas-t1246868-10.html

[What Came Before]

Yep.  See that looks like a pictographic representation of a four-horned head to me.

Co-incidentaly, Onkis' symbol is the copper tree - which is the same symbol the non-men marched under in the cunuroi-inchiroi wars.

Drawing a long bow perhaps, but as Duskweaver mentions (welcome btw ) the narindar claims Ajokli is the only god aware of the consult.
I don't have my copy of TDTCB atm, but I am fairly sure Onkis directly warns Inrau that the consult are about to get him and that he should run, so maybe that is not quite true.

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No-god is invisible, but the Consult is not. The consult have (or had) souls. Gods can perceive all intellects with souls.

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Oh, symbols. Thanks, Curethan.

Welcome, Duskweaver. Warhammer's got a special place in my heart too, especially the world of fiction manifested from the game's inception - 40,000k covers my SF kick too. Not that all serial writers are phenomenal at what they do.

Curethan, Onkis helping Inrau is based on a thought that the agency of the Outside is literally expressed in the perspective's of the characters textually. So maybe his explicit thoughts were responses to his POV musings but this is an assumption on our part - though I believe it and it explains a lot of the Outside's involvement in PON and AE.

I, too, think that Ajolki can see the No-God's actual involvement in history as it has unfolded, whereas the rest of the Gods just filled the hole in their perspective with rationalizations - Porsparian's claims that the Scrying of the Horde and the existence of Sranc are physical lies.

Though Bakker evokes much tradition Trickster metaphor with Ajolki, is he a Trickster in the established mythological sense or is he the trickster within the context of the narrative - the Gods label him such because they cannot understand why he reacts to what they cannot experience, ignorant of their ignorance?

[What Came Before]

Thanks for all the welcomes.

Believe me Warhammer is not the nerdiest thing round hear, not by a long shot, so don't worry about it.

Oh, it's not the potential nerdiness that worries me, it's just that I didn't quite trust my interpretation of the Shield of Sil, for the same reason I wouldn't necessarily trust (say) a devout Christian's interpretation of the Mesopotamian story of Utnapishtim ("Hey, this guy's obviously Noah, right?"). It's all too easy to interpret Story A as being influenced strongly by Story B simply because the one doing the interpretation is himself very familiar with Story B. There are a lot of things in the Second Apocalypse that (for me) feel a lot like RSB was influenced by certain themes in (mostly older editions - specifically the 'Star-Child' era) of Warhammer and 40,000. And I realise how irritating it would be to everyone else here if I showed up and started spouting about parellels that might just be coincidental.

t-shirt-ideas-t1246868-10.html

Was there not an earlier thread with more discussion of the Shield of Sil itself? That thread seems to mostly be talking about T-shirt slogans. Madness' post there mentions an ealier thread, and I'm sure I remember reading one a week or so ago, when I first discovered this place.

See that looks like a pictographic representation of a four-horned head to me.

That assumes we're interpreting RSB's description correctly, though. My version looks like a four-horned head because I (not entirely deliberately) drew it to resemble various 'Chaos runes' from Warhammer that themselves were (very deliberately) designed to resemble horned (daemonic) heads. Madness' version in the T-shirt thread also looks like a four-horned head, though, which is reassuring. It might be interesting to see if anyone can some up with a version that fits the textual description without looking like a four-horned head.

Co-incidentaly, Onkis' symbol is the copper tree - which is the same symbol the non-men marched under in the cunuroi-inchiroi wars.

Specifically the mansion of Siöl. Onkis' version has the tree growing through a woman's head, though. Which inclines me to wonder if perhaps it's a reference to Cû’jara-Cinmoi's forgiveness of Nin'janjin, a mercy which led directly to the womb-plague which claimed as its first victim Cû’jara-Cinmoi's own wife. It'd be funny if the symbol of the goddess of compassion was actually a warning about the dangers of extending compassion to those who don't merit it...

Onkis is also described as "a prophetess, not of the future, but of the motivations of Men", which makes her sound a bit like a Dûnyain. Arguably, of course, that's what 'compassion' really means: understanding the movement of others' souls. It does not necessarily have to imply 'being nice'.

Oh, symbols.

Just as long as we don't become too symbol-minded.

is he a Trickster in the established mythological sense or is he the trickster within the context of the narrative - the Gods label him such because they cannot understand why he reacts to what they cannot experience, ignorant of their ignorance?

Are those two really mutually exclusive?

[What Came Before]

All good points.
I drew the similarities between Sil's symbol and Ajokli from the description in the extract; but I am aware that I often see things because I look for them rather than because they were placed there

Your illustration is pretty much as I envisaged though - and I am not that familiar with Warhammer.

[What Came Before]

Co-incidentaly, Onkis' symbol is the copper tree - which is the same symbol the non-men marched under in the cunuroi-inchiroi wars.

Specifically the mansion of Siöl. Onkis' version has the tree growing through a woman's head, though. Which inclines me to wonder if perhaps it's a reference to Cû’jara-Cinmoi's forgiveness of Nin'janjin, a mercy which led directly to the womb-plague which claimed as its first victim Cû’jara-Cinmoi's own wife. It'd be funny if the symbol of the goddess of compassion was actually a warning about the dangers of extending compassion to those who don't merit it...

Onkis is also described as "a prophetess, not of the future, but of the motivations of Men", which makes her sound a bit like a Dûnyain. Arguably, of course, that's what 'compassion' really means: understanding the movement of others' souls. It does not necessarily have to imply 'being nice'.

Love this.


Crackpot, The cunoroi females were all turned into immortal trees.  AKA they became ent wives!

[What Came Before]

And I realise how irritating it would be to everyone else here if I showed up and started spouting about parellels that might just be coincidental.

Lol, I think that's part of the beauty, Duskweaver. I, for one, invite you to uninhibitedly sling your personal connotations around. A major theme of Bakker's works is toying with the ambiguity of the sender-receiver circuit and a reader's interaction with an artifact of code. From many perspectives, our experiences, our individual readings, and our collective associations are as much Earwa as the story in the books - we are the unfolding Second Apocalypse .

Maybe Warhammer remains your personal connotation - though I experience Bakker's world through my own associative lens, which happens to include accents of that other fictive world. But maybe your unique connections will provide us with blessed insight... which I cannot have on my own .

Was there not an earlier thread with more discussion of the Shield of Sil itself? That thread seems to mostly be talking about T-shirt slogans. Madness' post there mentions an ealier thread, and I'm sure I remember reading one a week or so ago, when I first discovered this place.

I'll keep looking for one here but the thread I was referencing in that post reflected discussions happening in one of the White-Luck Warrior threads at Westeros (G.R.R. Martin's forum, where many of us survived, obsessing together, since the fall of the old Three-Seas forum).

Lmao, symbol-minded... that's beyond double entendre .

Are those two really mutually exclusive?

I think so. Either the classic mythology wins out and nothing Ajolki does or says can be trusted except to toy with our ignorance or he possesses a greater frame of reference than the other Hundred and thus, can be trusted - something which is not readily available with the classic Triskter - to have more knowledge of Earwa's metaphysical objectivity.

Cheers. How'd you find the forum, btw?

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Hmmm...I believe that every letter in "Loki" appears in "Ajokli."

What does it mean?

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Crackpot, The cunoroi females were all turned into immortal trees. AKA they became ent wives!

I always wondered if Tolkien's 'lost entwives' were actually just perfectly ordinary trees, and that the ents were just so senile and/or had been around elves and men for so long that they'd forgotten that, as sentient trees, they didn't really have that sort of sexual dimorphism - i.e. they'd ended up in a mass delusion that anthropomorphised their own reproductive methods.

I, for one, invite you to uninhibitedly sling your personal connotations around.

Well, OK. Give me a day or two to get my thoughts in order and I'll put a list together of what seem to me to be the most potentially interesting parallels.

Lmao, symbol-minded... that's beyond double entendre

George Carlin deserves the credit for that one, really.

I think so. Either the classic mythology wins out and nothing Ajolki does or says can be trusted except to toy with our ignorance or he possesses a greater frame of reference than the other Hundred and thus, can be trusted - something which is not readily available with the classic Triskter - to have more knowledge of Earwa's metaphysical objectivity.

I'm not sure it could ever be a good idea to trust someone whose name is "A-Joke-Lie". That said, surely he can genuinely know things the other gods don't, while still being a Trickster god? Not all mythological Tricksters are malevolent sociopaths like Loki, after all, and there's no rule that says they have to be lying all the time. But it's quite possible I'm misunderstanding the point you're making.

Cheers. How'd you find the forum, btw?

I was looking for a Second Apocalypse wiki to check whether I was correctly remembering who a character in tWLW was, since it had been so long since I read the previous books. (I can't actually remember which character it was now, which just goes to show how atrocious my memory is.) I found http://princeofnothing.wikia.com/wiki/Second_Apocalypse, but also this place. Hooray for search engines (and my atrocious memory for character names).

[What Came Before]

I was looking for a Second Apocalypse wiki to check whether I was correctly remembering who a character in tWLW was, since it had been so long since I read the previous books. (I can't actually remember which character it was now, which just goes to show how atrocious my memory is.) I found http://princeofnothing.wikia.com/wiki/Second_Apocalypse, but also this place. Hooray for search engines (and my atrocious memory for character names).

Blessed correspondence of cause lol.

Not all mythological Tricksters are malevolent sociopaths like Loki, after all, and there's no rule that says they have to be lying all the time. But it's quite possible I'm misunderstanding the point you're making.

I'm just not sure. The classic Tricksters never offer a fair deal, for one. While you can wring "truth" from them, it is usually a double-edged revelation, and likely, you'll lose without gaining that revelation when entering into agreements with the Tricksters.

I had mentioned in the Ajokli thread that I originally thought that Ajokli reflected the classic archetype until the events of AE... Even if, as you seem to be trying to synthesis, Duskweaver, Ajolki is a classic Triskster yet has pertinent information for the reader or for the plot - it's going to be damned difficult getting it out of him and the penalty for failure in Bakker's Earwa... yeesh.

Who knows? I'd never really expanded on it until you arrived and Curethan thought to make the Ajokli thread.

Good call, on A-Joke-Lie.

[What Came Before]

I was looking for a Second Apocalypse wiki to check whether I was correctly remembering who a character in tWLW was, since it had been so long since I read the previous books. (I can't actually remember which character it was now, which just goes to show how atrocious my memory is.) I found http://princeofnothing.wikia.com/wiki/Second_Apocalypse, but also this place. Hooray for search engines (and my atrocious memory for character names).

Blessed correspondence of cause lol.
.

And Here could Circumstance most Holy be tended to.

[What Came Before]

I'm just not sure. The classic Tricksters never offer a fair deal, for one.

Or they offer you a fair deal, speaking only truth, and depend on their reputation as an untrustworthy Trickster to ensure you'll instead pick the other, less-favourable-to-you option because you think you're being oh-so-clever and getting one over on them.

Assuming a Trickster is lying is no safer than assuming they're telling the truth.

But how is that different from Kellhus, Achamian, or any of the other characters who seem to be giving us, the readers, information about Earwa? For instance, we tend to assume what Mimara's Judging Eye sees, and what Achamian tells her about how it works, is all perfectly accurate. But we don't know that at all. The Judging Eye could be a genetic manipulation of the Inchoroi, designed to show what the Inchoroi want Mimara to see. What Achamian thinks he knows about it might easily be wrong. Even Achamian's Dreams might be open to manipulation by outside forces (the effect the qirri seems to have on them certainly indicates this possibility).

While you can wring "truth" from them, it is usually a double-edged revelation, and likely, you'll lose without gaining that revelation when entering into agreements with the Tricksters.

Depends on the specific Trickster in question. Some of them use deceit in the short term to encourage true enlightenment in the longer term.

it's going to be damned difficult getting it out of him and the penalty for failure in Bakker's Earwa... yeesh.

Again, this is a generally true statement for the whole Second Apocalypse. We don't know what we don't know, and we can't be sure of the stuff we think we know.

None of that stops the people of Earwa from reaching certain consensus viewpoints on things such as damnation, so why should it stop us from doing the same? We at least only have to worry about potentially looking a bit silly when the next book comes out.