[TGO Spoilers] Whale Mothers

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geoffrobro

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« Reply #135 on: June 25, 2017, 07:24:01 pm »
While rereading, I was surprised I didn't get Achamian's explanation about how the Wathi doll works and the connection (the colors in the two passages below are the match) with both the previous Aörsi chapters (about Kellhus shredding Proyas's identity) and Mimara's Judging Eye vision about the Whale Mothers and Kellhus sitting on his black throne.
I mean, the passage even starts with the vision of Nau-Cayuti meeting Shae.

Quote from: TGO hardcover page 147, all fonts except color are in the text
A pit bent into a circle, the most perfect of the Conserving Forms...
"But isn't trapping souls an ancient art?" she asked.
"It is..." Achamian replied. He thought of the Wathi doll he once owned - and used to save himself from the Scarlet Spires when everyone, including Esmenet, had thought him dead. He had been reluctant, then, to think of the proxy that had been trapped within it. Had it suffered? Was it yet another of his multitudinous sins?
One more blemish for Mimara to glimpse with her Judging Eye?
"But souls are exceedingly complicated," he continued. "Far more so than the crude sorceries used to trap them. The intricacies of identity are always sheared away. Memory. Faculty. Character. These are cast into the pit... Only the most base urges survive in proxies."
Which was what made them such willful slaves.
"So to have your soul caught..." She trailed, frowning.
"Is to be twice-damned..." he said, trailing at the behest of a queer reluctance. Few understood the monstrosity of sorcery better than he. "To have your hungers enslaved in the World, while your thoughts are tormented in the Outside."

Quote from: TGO hardcover page 45, all fonts except color are in the text
They seize him from time to time, the Sons of this place, and he feels the seams tear, hears his scream. But he cannot come apart - for unlike the Countless Dead, his heart beats still.
There is a head on a pole behind you.
[...]
And he sees that these things are meat, here. Love is meat, Hope is meat. Courage. Outrage. Anguish. All these things are meat - seared over fire, sucked clean of grease.
There is a head on a pole.

I also noticed a similarity between the quotes above in red, with the quotes in purple below. It's not exactly the same, but Kellhus/ the Dunyain/ TTT as an avatar of "The guy(s) bringing Hell on Earth". Stripping everything and everyone down to its bare utility, just like the "Sons of this Place" stripping down people's Thoughts (as opposed to Souls) to the bone.

Quote from: TGO hardcover page 159-161, all fonts except color are in the text
Women bred into monstrous instruments of procreation, until they had become little more than puches slung about their wombs.
The misery. The huffing and moaning. The mewling screams. The inhuman men filing to their asignations, utterly heartless and insensate. The slapping of hip and genitalia. The animality of coupling stripped to its essential germ, to the milking pitch of inseminations...
Sadism without desire. Cruelty - unimaginable cruelty - absent the least will to inflict suffering.
And evil that only the Inchoroi could surpass.
And when her gaze flinches, she sees that this crim is no aberration, but rather an inevitable and extreme implication of what rules the whole. [...] The fevious pitch of intellect, domineering, devoid of compassion or humility...
And the will - the blasphemous will most of all. The deranged hunger to become God.
[...]
Suddenly she sees Him, her stepfather, Anasûrimbor Kellhus I, the Holy Aspect-Emperor, high on his throne, wreathed in darkness and fury, a malignant cancer cast across the far corners of the world...
Doom incarnate.
Suddenly she sees the Truth of the old Wizard's terror. A Dûnyain ruled the World - a Dûnyain!.

The quotes in blue also cause me to wonder if trapping souls is the way the Inchoroi made the Nonmen immortal: I mean, it would explain their damnation and why their memories fail, with Hell feasting upon them. It'd also be ironic to have the Nonmen be strung between the World and the Outside/ Hell by the Inchoroi, since they revere passages and thresholds.

Holy shit. What your saying puts A lot of other things into perspective. This need it's own thread
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Monkhound

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« Reply #136 on: June 27, 2017, 06:06:04 am »
You might be right. I posted it here since the Wathi doll is explained right before the passage of the Whale Mothers, but it's a bit cross-thread. 

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Madness

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« Reply #137 on: June 27, 2017, 01:45:08 pm »
I made a thread, Fathers in Earwa, based on what geoffro said to me in Quorum. There's no reason to move this post, tangents are some of the best threads on this forum.
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Monkhound

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« Reply #138 on: June 27, 2017, 02:52:22 pm »
Thanks! :)
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Wilshire

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« Reply #139 on: June 28, 2017, 03:24:50 am »
Great post monkhound, that ties some sections together really well.

Random thought I had, probably postulated by others here: could it be that Kellhus has been tethered to the outside since a certain point in the past (Daimos sessions with Iyokus?)?

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Or, say, when he nearly died at Umiaki and the Circumfixtion ;)
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