Warning : this is basically one huge spoiler, please don't read it if you've not read the first 5 books.
After all the fuss about getting a login it's just been awed page fright and lurking with intent for a month.
The problem : so many disorganised concepts, hundreds of highlighted passages which would require months of effort, a thousand thousand words and perhaps even a database to properly structure this in a way that merited the outside parsing these thoughts.
There's also some shy reluctance to theorize with some of the Grand Masters here, just having finished the second read through; and only just starting to form the biases which the third reading will certainly confirm.
The basic premise is that Bakker is an evangelist for the new school philosophy / world non-view, the number of detailed posts on his blog attest to this and it seems inconceivable that his works are not part of this mission, Neuropath explicitly. There are echoes of philosophy of AI in there : the mind is the software of the brain, and also reflections of the Buddhist selflessness : just a series of unconnected thoughts with no self involved. What thoughts passed through a person this morning is as much a part of them as the apple which passed through.
Here's how the metaphors line up with that reading so far IAHO
Earwa : a human
The hundred gods : the detached higher level drivers which govern human actions. Rules of humanity, impossible to catch more than a glimpse of.
The outside : other humans.
Seswatha dreams : the hero myth, the spark that inspires humans to imagine they can change their environment, their own thoughts. Deceiving.
Kellhus : the big, main false “I” in thoughts. The conviction all humans have that they act in a logical way decided by themselves.
Magic (School) : a person's false belief that they have altered parts of themselves, control the inner world
The mark : the inherent falseness of the assumption
Damnation : non-acceptance of inevitability of what made oneself what it is, the illusion and hope that it can be changed by internal moderation necessitates failure. That failure is damnation.
The Prince of Nothing : grandness of the human internal narrative and it's belief that it has control.
Sranc : basic human urges, countless, often hidden to self, warred against. Beautiful when we want them to be, animal when warring.
The Cishuaren : pure emotion, true, no intellect = no mark.
The No-God : a chance for salvation; destroyer of competing false thoughts. “Tell me what do you see”. This is what a human should be asking. The realisation of the semantic apocalypse. Or is it the emptiness' urge to create a self.
The No-God causing infertility : If most entities in Earwa are a false thought process, then the entrance of a concept which nullifies all previous convictions on thought would cause them to stop cascading.
Conquering from North to South in first Trilogy and South to North in second : Time, human development. First the mind that controls actions, then the genitals, then the mind again.
The Tekne : technology / science - things which look like our thought's but aren't. Visited many other planets – thought by many other humans. Show us glimpses of uncomfortable truths. Not understandable, gives rise to the No-God, the semantic apocalypse.
Non-men : innate thoughts, more powerful and beautiful than normal thoughts. Nearly immortal without needing to reproduce.
Chorae : moments of selfless realisation of that which came before determining everything, stop the illusion that is magic.
Akka : Self doubt. Internal spy, capable of deception and often deceived. Powerful. Wants to challenge the arrogance and truth of the “I” which Kellhus represents by finding it's birthplace.
Destruction of Isthael (likely by Kellhus) : Humans experience the formation of the “I”, our self doubt tries to find it, but the I must destroy all traces of it to maintain the illusion.
144,000 – Oh. Was really hoping it would be the number of synaptic firings in the brain needed to produce consciousness, or number of bits in a DNA sequence, or something like that. Google just tells me it's the Jehovas. That's just ruined everything. There's always the Mayan long year, but that feels like stretching things.
I'll stop there, it's 7:25am after all.
Do have plenty of quotes to back all this up, honest guv, but right now it's too much to find them.
Comments, deconstructions, corrections warmly received. Sorry for awful butchering of Bakker words (Isthael, really)
