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•The Psûkhe is non-cognitive, born of feeling/intuition rather than intellect, and thus feels like the purview of the Darkness; of course, it does not damn its users

Do we know this to be true?  We know it leaves no Mark, but is there any evidence its practitioners aren't damned beyond that?  Chorae not only protect against the Psukhe, but kill its practitioners.

I believe one of the glossaries states that the Psûkhe is non-cognitive, and I recall Bakker once confirming in an older interview that the Psûkhe had no truck with meaning and thus leaves no mark; also we have Kellhus's explanation to Moënghus that it depends on one's ability to feel. So maybe I should say that it feels like a good fit with the Darkness-is-God narrative.

Chorae have no interaction with damnation, only with sorcery---otherwise very few people would be able to carry them. You're completely right that we don't have direct evidence that the Psûkhe doesn't damn its users, but in fairness we have almost none of that kind of evidence for anything (we don't even know that sorcery contributes to Achamian's Damnation, as I recall Mimara musing, in TJE maybe?). There is reason to suspect, cautiously, that the Mark correlates with Damnation, however, (do we know if the Non-men believe this?) and we know that the Psûkhe does not leave a mark, so I counts it as weak evidence.

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•Creatures such as Sranc, which are naught but the Darkness, are neither damned nor holy (almost like they find oblivion by default).

Sranc are merely soulless; animate dolls made of meat.  They don't so much find Oblivion as they ARE Oblivion.

Quite right! Again, more of a fit with the narrative than direct evidence.

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•The erratic who finds oblivion was an erratic. But to be an erratic is to be entirely surrounded by the Darkness, no?

This is interesting.  If true, perhaps the Dolour is the ultimate savior of the Non-Men, the best thing that could ever happen to them.  But it raises questions about the Inverse Fire, which apparently is the tool the Consult used to recruit erratic Non-Men in the first place; they seem to see themselves in the Pit, which both helps restore them to lucidity and causes them to believe that finding Oblivion is a fool's errand.  Could the Inverse Fire be wrong sometimes?  Could one see oneself as damned but still find Oblivion?  Why would an erratic Non-Man join the Consult if the Inverse Fire showed him finding Oblivion, or otherwise not suffering damnation?  Does it lie and show everybody in the Pit?  That would seem appropriate to its status as The Goad, but Kellhus claimed it burned true and saw himself descending as Hunger, so who knows.

I actually took that line from Kellhus as being spoken by Ajokli---that gazing into the Inverse Fire was a helpful extra link between Ajokli and Kellhus at just the right moment in just the right place... In fact, I kinda thought Kellhus saw Ajokli in the IF, had some battle-of-souls/wills with him (which would explain why Malowebi thought Kellhus stared motionless for so long), and lost. That's all pure speculation, though (and someone has probably already come up with this same theory or a better version of it on the other threads.)

Anyway, I think you point out some really good questions about the Inverse Fire! But they're really questions about Oblivion, not about the Dolour being the path to it. Maybe the Dolour/Darkness is a path to Oblivion or maybe the true path to Oblivion requires some ancient meditation; either way, I'm curious what that Erratic would have seen had he gazed into the Inverse Fire. And either way, we have to explain why an Erratic---of all Non-men!---is our first verified instance of a soul finding Oblivion. The fact that Mekeretrig saw his suffering soul in the IF probably just indicates that there's more to it than simply having been afflicted by the Dolour in some capacity over the years. Maybe Oblivion requires that you die so deep in the memory-loss that your identity has basically already dissolved?

I think we can go one step further w.r.t. the idea of "subsuming". When the Dûnsult talk about this, their phrasing is interesting; they do not say "We subsumed the Consult." or "We subsumed the Dûnyain." Instead they say just "We subsumed." I think the idea is that an uncareful reader will see "We [, the Dûnyain,] subsumed [the Consult]." My impression was that it should be read as "We [, the Consult and the Dûnyain,] subsumed [each other]."

Really interesting ideas in this thread!

My $0.02:
The thing I kept wondering when seeing the Mutilated was, why are they, all but one, mutilated?

• Maybe Shauriatas tortured them; or
• maybe they happened to lose body-parts in self-defense, the way Koringhus got his scars; or
• maybe they sacrificed a bunch of body parts for experiments with the Ark---maybe trying to get the Ark birth "Srâncyain"

All of these possibilities seem reasonable, but they don't answer the question of why just one of them isn't scarred. Here's one answer that works for all three possibilities: the unscarred one is Shauriatis, or was Shauriatis once.

Examine the scene where Kellhus talks to the Dûnsult. One of the first things he asks is "How long did it take to purge the Thousand Thousand Halls?":

    "One thousand six-hundred and eleven days," the second figure replied. He alone appeared unscarred and intact, though his attitude was so remote as to be cruel.
    "We could not cope with the Erratics," the third added. This one bore two great scars on his head:
 the first a vaginal pit in lieu of his right eye; and the second more subtle, a slash the length of a hand-scythe, rimming the perimeter of his head from crown to throat, as if someone had abandoned an attempt to remove his face.
    "That is," the Aspect-Emperor said, "until they took you captive."

(Note that the unscarred person rather un-Dûnyainishly has an expression that looks "cruel" to Malowebi.)

That last line seems like an intentional meaning to either Shauriatis or the Dûnyain: either "until [the Dûnyain] took [you, Shauriatis] captive" or "until [the Consult] took [you, the Dûnyain] captive". Throughout this whole conversation, the assumption seems to work: the unscarred one calls to and instructs Aurang; he never talks about Shauriatis in the third person---only the others do. He's the one who says "we have scrutinized the Ark." When the Dûnyain talk about their own history, the unscarred one does not contribute; instead he talks about the progenitors.

I think all of this is consistent with the idea that the Dûnyain merged souls and subsumed Shauriatis in some fashion; when they say "So Shauriatis alone was undone." what they mean is that they broke him down until he no longer had any individual identity.

[EDIT Madness: Fixed quote tag.]