Earwa > The Warrior-Prophet

Kellhus and the No-God

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Wilshire:
There are certainly a lot of cases of people experiencing similar hallucinations.  Government spying on you constantly and robots replacing people are somewhat common-ish delusions.

Like you said TS, its possible that halos are a common cultural thing and that crazies would happen to see the same thing, but it seems really unlikely, especially because we don't really see any mentally ill people in PoN (at least, not of the kind we are talking about).

The Sharmat:
Everyone is a little bit crazy, though. Sanity being kind of arbitrary in a world where no one is truly objective can be argued to be a theme of the first trilogy.

Wilshire:
Not at all. If anything, the halo's point to an objectivity existing more profoundly in Earwa than irl.

The Sharmat:
But they don't, necessarily, as has been discussed up thread.

I guess it depends on what you mean by "objective".

Francis Buck:

--- Quote from: The Sharmat on February 25, 2015, 03:50:22 am ---I guess it depends on what you mean by "objective".

--- End quote ---

I think the matter of objectivity and subjectivity, in particular the individual definitions/meanings of such things, are a theme that's pretty core to TSA and I suspect there will be some kind of reckoning regarding the nature of these concepts actually function in Earwa, come TUC.

As a result I'm of two minds about the halo's "being real". I do think there's an element of mass hysteria/delusion involved (somewhat only because I think that applies to basically everything in the series), but I think it may also be a commentary on that sort of thing, since we've been shown (repeatedly) what we as people from the Real World assume to be religious-mumbo-jumbo ends up being REAL in Earwa. Places are actually haunted. Gods actually exist, and frequently intervene with mundane life.

Earwa is intrinsically a meaningful place. There, “madness” or “being crazy” straight up do not have the same cost-benefit ratio that they do IRL, at least not for now. A schizophrenic in our world makes connections that don't actually exist because our universe lacks any intrinsic meaning at all (in theory). In Earwa, everything has meaning, everything is bundled up with meaningfulness – lunacy, in some capacity at least, allows one to see things “more clearly” I think, but perhaps only on a higher level, and at the expense of clarity for the “mundane”, everyday world.

Also, two things stand out from TGO for me:
(click to show/hide)At one point, Kellhus looks down to the haloes and ponders "how difficult to explain they are". This doesn't really jive for me if it's just another belief-makes-real situation, which at this stage of the series is, relatively-speaking, not particularly difficult to explain to either the audience or the characters (such as Proyas), especially by TGO where the philosophy is on steroids.

Secondly, Kellhus also ruminates on how the walls of the eleven pole chamber are deliberately black to make the haloes more obvious or apparent. If the haloes are completely false and exist only in the minds of people, then this would be pointless. The haloes would be as bright as the person believed them to be.

My idea as to the strange qualities of the haloes (and the reason they cast no light) is because they are akin to the way Cnaiur's strange “overlapping” appearance as Ciphrang. Whatever the haloes are, they are like a shadow of Kellhus's future/destiny, which exists atemporally as all things related to the Outside do.

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