This was a thread of discussion that emerged from The Synthese/V. Bird[/u] (http://secondapocalypse.forumer.com/the-synthese-v-bird-t1246867.html) thread.
Esmenet has two encounters with Aurang, one in TDTCB and another in TTT. In TTT, it precedes Esmenet's possession, following which she retains some of Aurang's memories.
Has this had a lingering effect on Esmenet or her womb? Did it change Kayutas, whom Esmenet might well have been pregnant with at the time of her possession?
Quote from: MadnessThis was a thread of discussion that emerged from The Synthese/V. Bird[/u] (http://secondapocalypse.forumer.com/the-synthese-v-bird-t1246867.html) thread.
Esmenet has two encounters with Aurang, one in TDTCB and another in TTT. In TTT, it precedes Esmenet's possession, following which she retains some of Aurang's memories.
Has this had a lingering effect on Esmenet or her womb? Did it change Kayutas, whom Esmenet might well have been pregnant with at the time of her possession?
Doubt it. Possession is similar to cant of compulsion where one soul takes over another. Cayutas has his own soul so he shouldn't be affected. Also, I don't think she has any of Aurang's memory. She just remembers what she has done while Aurang has possessed her.
Now that you brought it up, I do wonder about the first encounter -- just where did Aurang got that human male body? Did he just possess some random guy on the street? It can't be the body of a skin-spy since those things don't have souls to possess.
I doubt the little man-headed birds have souls either, but Aurang seems to ride those synthese quite well and is able to use sorcery from within them.
Synthese -- Artifacts of the Inchoroi Tekne, thought to be living "shells" specifically designed to house the souls of the senior Consult figures.
Some sort of soul transfer/splitting technology.
Well enough. The little bird critters may not be the only synthese they use I suppose - the black semen makes me think it wasn't just a random possessed guy.
In fact, I tend to think that something was done to Esme that night to allow the latter possession. Aurang knew she would go to Akka afterward - they even had Sarcellus following her to make sure she got there okay. Probably has the tekne equivilent of a wire and GPS in her bits.
It's interesting to note that the no-god can extend his will through the weapon races though. Don't know if that will include the skin spies when He rises again.
Kellhus seems to think the Synthese takes Maengecca and a bit of sorcery to keep Aurang in it's form.
Aurang's romp with Esmenet is an oft debated subject - I lean towards Glamour personally, a third type of sorcery after Cants and Wards.
I always wondered what other type of straight teknology the Inchoroi might have besides las guns, Curethan, I mean, the Heron Spear...
Yeh, he's definately using the passion touch thing there - same as Aurax does in the WP epilogue. That could be sorcery or some tekne pheromone type power.
The ability to remotely possess people like Aurang does to Esme in TTT would be invaluable from an espionage perspective. Not to mention assasinations would be a piece of cake around anyone with lesser skills than Kellhus. First apocolypse could have been a lot shorter; just possess Nau-Cayuti and have him nobble his dad - Norasai taken care of, etc.
I've fairly convinced myself that Esme was compromised with facilitating tekne bio-mods via that black seed. ;)
@ TS, I'm working off this mainly:
"Esmenet dreamed that she was a prince, an angel fallen from the dark, that her heart had beaten, her loins had ached, for tens of thousands of years. She dreamed that Kellhus stood before her, an outrage to be blotted, an enigma to be dissected and above all a burning question ...
Who are the Dunyain?
...
The night in the Nansur villa - the night of her possession - had stained this listless dread with a bewildering urgency. Every time she blinked, she saw things penetrated and penetrating. She could still feel the creatures hands upon her flesh, and the memory of her obedient lust seemed ever-present. The hunger she had suffered that night! A thirst that only terror could touch, and that no horror could slake. At once bestial and remote, it had been a wantonness that eclipsed obscenity... and become something pure.
The Inchoroi had taken her, but the want, the insatiable desire... those had been hers" (TTT, p355).
Obviously, Esmenet internalizes her compulsion as aspects of her self. But realistically, these reflections are likely Aurang's...
What does that make Kayutas, Curethan? It'd be crazy if one of the kids had... say, inherited really far-flung memories of the Inchoroi, like of their homeworld.
Just a side thought: does Kellhus know of Esmi's encounter w/ the "man with black seed"? If so, did this have any bearing upon his choosing of her?
I was reading through the posts and the thought kind of popped up, thought I'd share, maybe its already been speculated?
Not according to his POV reflections, Eramun:
"He looked through her, past her bewildered hurt, down to the beatings and the abuse, to the betrayals, and beyond, out to a world of rank lust, shaped by the hammers of custom, girded with scripture, scaled by ancient legacies of sentiment and belief. Her womb had cursed her, even as it made her what she was. Immortality and bliss - this was the living promise all women bore between their thighs. Strong sons and gasping climax. If what men called truth were ever the hostage of their desires, how could they fail to make slaves of their women? To hide them like hoarded gold. To feast on them like melons. To discard them like rinds.
Was this not why he used her? The promise of sons in her hips?
Dunyain sons" (TTT, p319).
However, I assume that Kellhus knows everything about the characters who frequent his presence...
Glad you decided to join in, Eramun. I'm sure its been thrown around in the past but we're all spontaneously imagining the same theories continuously anyhow. It's enough that we're communicating :).
Quote from: MadnessObviously, Esmenet internalizes her compulsion as aspects of her self. But realistically, these reflections are likely Aurang's...:shock: nice catch!QuoteWhat does that make Kayutas, Curethan? It'd be crazy if one of the kids had... say, inherited really far-flung memories of the Inchoroi, like of their homeworld.That would fly with Dune parallels.
Like the compulsions have always been described, what makes them so terrible is there is no distinction between self and other. They subject feels everything they are told to feel as if it was derived from their own mind.
Compulsion's real creepy.
Fuck, I really want Serwa's perspective. And Kayutas'.
I think speculating that the black seed contained some type of tekne "tracker" is about as far as I would go.
Geneticly modeling her ovaries so that the future children of a whore that habitually uses contraception in the hope that she would become Kellhus' choice to bear children seems a little far fetched.
I try and speculate along the lines that Bakker builds off the internal consistencies of his world and plot building for things like that.
When he inserts parralels and tributes it's generally fairly front and centre stuff, I think.
Well, the iconic events of Dune to me are the character developments and interactions. There is nothing more overt that Bakker could take from Herbert, in my opinion:(click to show/hide)
Really? I feel like it's plot devices (the LOTR homage in TJE) and setting elements (Dune stuff; like skin spies/flesh dancers, eugenics to make a prophet, etc)
Just seems too much of a stretch plot-wise to incorporate it for its own sake, if you see what I mean.
Depends how much Bakker just let the derivatives build up and mash together, I guess? It's a neat idea.
Maith has a mother as well and it's not esme. Although i often wonder at his mother, considering his reference to Inrilitas about having his mothers bones and them being soft. Was Maithanet a test-tube baby or was his mother big-boned?
...
One generation of genetic drift does not a new species make.
I'm starting to think that the union of human and nonman is not actually achieved by sexual activity at all. It's actually a product of huffing dead nonman ash.
I like this idea. Mimara has twins! One is dead like what happened with old Celmomas? Sranc hide makes a great material for a double stroller.I'm pretty sure Kelmomas is already the recapitulation of Celmomas.
and modern Dunyain take longer to gestate than other Homo sapiens
And I'm just left wondering who Mimara's father was and how come he broke the shell's spell of infertility.
And I'm just left wondering who Mimara's father was and how come he broke the shell's spell of infertility.
But if his divine seed was a burden she could scarce bear, then it broke all the others. Of the seventeen concubines he impregnated, ten died in childbirth, and the others gave birth to more... nameless ones. Thirteen in sum, all drowned in wine.So on the one hand we have a genetic difference so big that it produces a baby with eight arms and no eyes, but on the other, it does not preclude "normal" children (normal in that their bodies are fully human). Somehow it does not seem possible to me.
For the first time, it seemed, he noticed how much lighter her skin was than his or her mother's. For the first time he wondered about her real father, about the twist of caprice that had seen her born, rather than aborted by Esmenet's whore-shell.So it seems her father must've been a Norsirai.
+1 your post, The Sharmat. By the way, is this bit textual or something you're otherwise noting? Just curious if this results from an isolated population breeding over long periods of time?It's from the text. If I remember correctly, Esmenet said she'd carried most of them for around a year.
Somehow it does not seem possible to me.Duplication of whole limbs is a very easy mutation, actually. You see it a lot in nature. There are even a number of recorded instances of it occurring in humans, some very recent. A girl in India with 8 limbs a few years back was thought by some to be the avatar of a Hindu Goddess. Just copy some Hox genes somewhere during meiosis, and suddenly you get an extra arm. Or you switch something out, and you now have legs where the antennae are supposed to go.
(No eyes, that's something I could accept as a genetic glitch, but eigth arms?)
Thanks Sharmat, thats the kind of input I was hoping for. Might I direct you to my thread regarding the initial size of the original Dunyain refugees? (http://second-apocalypse.com/index.php?topic=993.msg8304#msg8304) I've been fishing for a biologist for a while ;) its got visual aids at the bottom.I'll take a look.
So I may or may not have started some fires at Westeros over the past couple days...
But in the flames following, I found that the commentary about birth and Yatwer insightful and needing to be considered in these conversations.
Crazypottheory: Aurang left a ticking time bomb in Esmi's mind. At the crucial moment, she's going to see the Inverse Fire just as Aurang did. Prolly same time Akka sees it.
The consensus was there, MG, that Yatwer started interfering with Esmenet's pregnancies when the abominations started, which probably correlates to when the Hundred turned against Kellhus. Then Kelmomas and Samarmas is an Ajokli intervention on Yatwer's decree.Crazypottheory: Aurang left a ticking time bomb in Esmi's mind. At the crucial moment, she's going to see the Inverse Fire just as Aurang did. Prolly same time Akka sees it.
Amazing. This could be a thing.
I took you to mean that Aurang saw the Inverse Fire and Esmenet could have the Inchoroi's memory of that.
Well Moenghus was NOT the first Dunyain they sent into the world.Do we know this for a fact?
The consensus was there, MG, that Yatwer started interfering with Esmenet's pregnancies when the abominations started, which probably correlates to when the Hundred turned against Kellhus. Then Kelmomas and Samarmas is an Ajokli intervention on Yatwer's decree.Crazypottheory: Aurang left a ticking time bomb in Esmi's mind. At the crucial moment, she's going to see the Inverse Fire just as Aurang did. Prolly same time Akka sees it.
Amazing. This could be a thing.
The time bomb IS Kelmomas?
EDIT: time bomb is mimara's baby--culmination of the prophecy
"and a child of the void will conceive our savior in a womb that is a pit"
I wonder how advanced the Dunyain project was when they found Ishual? I don't think we have any info on that--the timeline could go way way back.As far as I remember, two thousand years ago they've lacked a large part of principles, which made them so determined & effective (Emperical Priority & Rational Priority, Epistemological Principle).
Plus the Inchoroi came from there and are referred to as orphans as if the thing was their Mother.Father, Seswatha corrected Nau-Cayuti.
Plus the Inchoroi came from there and are referred to as orphans as if the thing was their Mother.Father, Seswatha corrected Nau-Cayuti.
Might be telling as to the role of females in primitive Inchoroi society and biology.
i think he says "or fathered" and mentions they dont have the concepts to understand them.Plus the Inchoroi came from there and are referred to as orphans as if the thing was their Mother.Father, Seswatha corrected Nau-Cayuti.
Might be telling as to the role of females in primitive Inchoroi society and biology.
lol that might be too much for me to take. The Inchoroi driving around in a mechano-biological god of birth...