[locke]

What if the No God is Kellhus?

Kellhus tried to teleport out of Moenghus' cave, but the spell didn't work the way he expected.  Kellhus was lost in the outside and the No God seized his frame to come back inward.  Because the NG is not a ciphrang the non-men did not recognize him.  A substitution occured.

Existence cringed before the whip of his voice. Space cracked. Here was pried into there. Beyond his father he saw Serwë, her blonde hair tied into a war-knot. He saw her leap out of the black …

Even as he toppled into one far greater.

And of course that's always begged the question to me, did he see into the black and see Serwe, or did he see the-thing-called-serwe (which Moenghus had already disabled/killed) come back to life to attack him?

And the next time we see Kellhus he takes on characteristics of the NG, like the whirlwind.

[locke]

http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/09/22/evils-shadowy-existence-realclearreligion-9-14/

Digging deeper than many reflections on the recent film about Hannah Arendt and her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, Fr. Robert Barron reminds us of Arendt’s debt to St. Augustine:

The young Hannah Arendt had written her doctoral dissertation under the great German philosopher Karl Jaspers, and the topic of her work was the concept of love in the writings of Saint Augustine. One of the most significant intellectual breakthroughs of Augustine’s life was the insight that evil is not something substantial, but rather a type of non-being, a lack of some perfection that ought to be present. Thus, a cancer is evil in the measure that it compromises the proper functioning of a bodily organ, and a sin is evil in the measure that it represents a distortion or twisting of a rightly functioning will. Accordingly, evil does not stand over and against the good as a kind of co-equal metaphysical force, as the Manichees would have it. Rather, it is invariably parasitic upon the good, existing only as a sort of shadow.

J.R.R. Tolkien gave visual expression to this Augustinian notion in his portrayal of the Nazgul in The Lord of the Rings. Those terrible and terrifying threats, flying through the air on fearsome beasts, are revealed, once their capes and hoods are pulled away, to be precisely nothing, emptiness. And this is exactly why, to return to Arendt’s description, evil can never be radical. It can never sink down into the roots of being; it can never stand on its own; it has no integrity, no real depth or substance. To be sure, it can be extreme and it can, as Arendt’s image suggests, spread far and wide, doing enormous damage. But it can never truly be.

[Somnambulist]

What if the No God is Kellhus?

I am currently re-reading the series (what else am I gonna do until TUC comes out?), and am on TWP.  Reading the part where the Holy War is camped out on the Plains of Mangedda, and Akka is having a particularly intense dream of the First Apocalypse.  Between dreaming and waking from this dream, he's having a conversation with Esme about Kellhus.  The No-God is shown speaking, threading his dialogue in with the conversation about Kellhus.  Seems like it might be supporting your theory, giving some foreshadowing.  Does Kellhus succeed in obtaining the Absolute, thus transforming into the No-God in the process?  Classic case of 'be careful what you wish for'...

[Madness]

Lol - Bakker certainly knows Augustine well.

Also, locke, it's very interesting to note that that quoted passage is Kellhus' last POV in the whole series, neh?

[Galbrod]

Is not the No-God supposed to be invisible to the gods?  If so, could the visions of the White-Luck-Warrior concerning the future killing of Kellhus be seen as evidence that Kellhus is not the No-God?

[Wilshire]

Is not the No-God supposed to be invisible to the gods?  If so, could the visions of the White-Luck-Warrior concerning the future killing of Kellhus be seen as evidence that Kellhus is not the No-God?

That is a very good point.

[Madness]

I've always had it in my head that the visions of the Gods and the Warrior are fallible, in that, like ourselves, they will invent rationalizations to cover the unknown unknowns in their environment... Maybe the Gods have some completely different revelation about the First Apocalypse.

[Wilshire]

Who did they blame for that? Was there another Kellhus figure that they decided to blame everything on? More questions, no answers.

[Madness]

Seswatha. It'd be ironic. The Gods are pissed at him.

[Wilshire]

Really? I guess he did all the rabble rousing, but surely they Gods arn't so blind as to think he was the cause of all the death... Could they see him use the heron spear? Wonder what he would have been shoot at. If you couldn't see NG then I guess it would look like someone shot a giant beam of light which created some kind of terrible plague.

[Madness]

Lol, I didn't say I'd provide the rationalization .

The Gods really do have no reason to believe that Sranc are real, they aren't ensoulled.

Perhaps, the Gods do really want Aurang, Aurax, Mekeritrig, and Shauriatas, though.

[Cüréthañ]

The hundred are aware of the sranc.  Herons track them, remember.  Animals are also unsoulled (for the main), yet some are holy.
Iirc, sranc are referred to as lies.  Who else do we know that is referred to in similar terms?  Nonmen - the false.

Shauritias boasts that he walks paths the gods cannot see.  For me, this is a clue that he feels unbound from causality. 

Khellus' convo with Aurang in TTT provides the best rationale for abject damnation: transgression of the boundaries of skin.  In my mind, the tekne and sorcery both violate  causality by physical alterations and this may be the key to it.  The logos otoh provides a method for 'natural' alteration or mastery of causality and therefore is something the gods can see and oppose.

As to whom the hundred blame for causal events where they are ignorant of the cause; either sorcery or the solitary god seem like viable explanations.
However Celmomas' prophecy suggests the gods are involved with his son's return.  Or perhaps the vision is granted by the God.

The no-god's nature as a construct of sorcery and tekne makes it the opposite of the 'divine' rather than some kind of apotheosis of evil. Tsuramah is an all permeating awareness within the material plane with no reflective self awareness.  He doesn't exist at all in the outside.  Of course the hundred would be blind to him.  And what death should the hundred gods notice when he is around?  The soul that encounters him passes no further.

[Borric]

Really? I guess he did all the rabble rousing, but surely they Gods arn't so blind as to think he was the cause of all the death... Could they see him use the heron spear? Wonder what he would have been shoot at. If you couldn't see NG then I guess it would look like someone shot a giant beam of light which created some kind of terrible plague.

Going off on a tangent here. 
But he didn’t use the Heron spear.
He had the king leading the last defence use it.

Didn’t that seem odd to you guys? It did to me, I remember Seswartha shouting at the king to use it.
So why the hell didn’t he use it?, I’d put it down to prestige or something at the time.

But maybe there is more to it. Maybe the real reason he took NG along with him into the ark was because he cannot touch the spear.
Maybe its imbued with chorae, maybe that’s how they tracked it in the ark.

If any of that is true, then he would have needed a normal person to hide the spear.
Maybe some obscure sect he could securely hide in a mountain fortress he was privy to?
One who would wipe their collective minds of the past. Going as far as “chiselling rune sorceries from the walls”

[Wilshire]

Thats a good point. I find it hard to believe that Seswatha would place the fate of the world in the hands of someone else, unless he absolutely had to (i.e chorae).

[Galbrod]

A very interesting thought... But I thought the Heron Spear to be a Inchie artifact (i.e. laser gun) and chorae to be something that was created much later by practitioners of the Aporos.  It is of course possible that the aporos created chorae based on ancient blueprints provided by the Inchoroi.