The Dresden Files > DF Reference Collection
Grand Unifying Cosmological Mantle Theory [Series spoilers including MM WoJs]
Mith:
--- Quote ---Meh, I'm sorry, but I'm not interested in that discussion at all.
--- End quote ---
--- Quote ---I'm sure that those that care have a sufficiently strong counter argument for that in their arsenal, or find that to not be sufficiently strong enough to sway them.
I'd rather just let the point lie. It's a good point (both yours and his), that has been debated vigorously for millennia. I don't see it getting resolved in this topic...
--- End quote ---
Fair enough. And it also looks like Jim deals with it by the "lay of the land" metaphor that Uriel uses in The Warrior anyways.
KG:
--- Quote from: Serack on June 22, 2014, 01:06:44 AM ---KG's George concepts are especially thought provoking. The main place where they break down for me is that one of "Edna's" 6 faces she uses to interface with Harry happens to be his apprentice of several years. However, I must say that it holds together pretty much as well as my vaunted "GUCMT"
For me, it works best because I feel as though the Mothers are indeed putting on a face when they interact with Harry in order for him to best understand with his limited perceptions what they are.
--- End quote ---
I'm not 100% sure I understand why the bolded portion gives you pause, but I'll try to clarify some more and you can let me know if I'm coming at it from the wrong angle.
Edna is the whole being, but in Harry's reality she manifests as 6 Queens to interact with mortals that help her do her Job. What Harry knows as the Queens is only a small portion of the true Edna. Think of Edna as the full entity/body. The Queens together might just be a hand (this is kind of a different way of describing Griff's Tree metaphor). In Harry's reality, a couple of Edna's fingers got infected, so the lopped them off to keep the entire hand from getting infected. However, Edna has sufficient power to "regenerate" her amputated fingers. This is obviously a metaphor for killing off the Nemesis-infected Queens and replacing them with new ones.
At first blush it seems a little too convenient to say Edna is so powerful she can just grow new digits, and that's why new Queens are made. But, if you think about it from the immutability standpoint, Edna /must/ have a full compliment of fingers because she, as the full being, cannot change. The only thing that can change is how Harry perceives her. However, in Harry's reality, he (and everyone in the know) perceives it as a law of nature that there are 6 Queens, so it /must/ be so that when one Queen dies another takes her place. Until some event takes place in Harry's reality that makes people start to believe the laws of nature/magic are changing such that there may no longer /have/ to be 6 Queens, there will always be 6 Queens. Over time the perception in Harry's reality might change, and Edna will manifest in that reality differently based on how mortal perception shifts. However, the full being that is Edna will not change.
So if there /must/ be 6 Queens in Harry's reality, then there /must/ be a mechanism to change who the Queens are, if needed. The Mantles are this mechanism. While I agree that it's pretty damned inconvenient for Molly to have received the Winter Lady Mantle, she made choices with her own Free Will that led to the circumstance. She wasn't fully drafted into the war against her will, but she didn't fully volunteer to serve, either. It's a weird grey area, but she made sufficient choices to open herself up to becoming a part of this interface system, and now she's got to deal with it. She's still Molly, to a degree, but the Mantle is also changing her some. She literally can't tell Harry when he asks about her new job, but she can use a cell phone. However, we have evidence that she will always retain a portion of her Free Will, because Maeve was slacking off on her job for 150 years. Unless we assume Maeve was infected for that length of time, we can deduce that she exercised Free Will in deciding not to do her job. This is similar to the way Mab can make Harry do some things, but she cannot make him /choose/ to do them. Free Will still exists in the being, but it might be a little more constrained by the Mantle.
I don't know if that addressed the issue that was bothering you or not, but I'm enjoying the conversation. Let me know if I got your concern all wrong and I'll regroup. :)
And please, no jokes about Edna's malformed, six-fingered hand! She's really quite sensitive about it. :P
Griffyn612:
--- Quote from: KG on June 23, 2014, 09:53:24 PM ---Edna is the whole being, but in Harry's reality she manifests as 6 Queens to interact with mortals that help her do her Job.
--- End quote ---
The question, at least for me, is whether or not Hecate still exists in some form of higher awareness, or if Hecate ceased to exist in order to bring the six queens about.
My guess is that Hecate was too powerful to interact with the world. She decided to divide herself into three aspects: one that was still to powerful to truly interact with the world, in order to retain as much power as possible; a second that was a balance between the real world and the never-world; and a third that was particularly weak, in the great scale of things, that can interact abundantly with the real world.
Traditional beliefs dictate that Hecate was One, and then she became the Triple goddess. Perhaps she became three, and then those three further divided as she took on more Power due to her expanded roles. She then became two of each, for a total of six.
But in my interpretation, that initial being, Hecate, is no more. The Queens can be collectively referred to as Hecate, and they may serve the roles that she served, but I don't think she can be reconstituted. I think that's the price she payed for more interaction with the real world.
Others, like Hades, never broke apart their power, so they cannot act upon the real world. They are the original Aeon spawn, given shape and purpose by faith and belief. I think the compromise is that Hades, as a shapeless and nameless Aeon, already bore characteristics and traits that he has now, but faith and belief gave him the shape and name he has. Whether he recalls a time before he was what he is, or whether he truly existed before that, is hard to argue.
I swear, a while back, there was a WoJ that Uriel might not be an archangel that has existed from the dawn of time; instead, he might be a being that believes he is.
That would play into the faith/belief aspect of shaping Aeons. Uriel might be an upper-level Aeon that hasn't divided, or spawned, but he didn't have a Uriel personality or purpose until after humanity thought of him.
I understand the desire to try and keep the theory focused on the Fae, rather than other houses and pantheons, because it gets all jumbled. How could Uriel only be 2,000 years old, and remember everything that happened before as if he were there? It would be as if an Aeon existed that entire time, but wasn't shaped until after Christianity gave him shape.
Mith:
--- Quote --- How could Uriel only be 2,000 years old, and remember everything that happened before as if he were there? It would be as if an Aeon existed that entire time, but wasn't shaped until after Christianity gave him shape.
--- End quote ---
A way to look at this problem may be that a mantle carries the memories of the previous hosts, and that different pantheons are interpretations of a finite number of mantles. So Uriel may not have existed prior to the start of Judaism, but the mantle has existed prior to that, and so he remembers farther back than that through the mantle.
Griffyn612:
--- Quote from: Mith on June 24, 2014, 01:43:22 AM ---A way to look at this problem may be that a mantle carries the memories of the previous hosts, and that different pantheons are interpretations of a finite number of mantles. So Uriel may not have existed prior to the start of Judaism, but the mantle has existed prior to that, and so he remembers farther back than that through the mantle.
--- End quote ---
But Uriel, of all of them, doesn't seem to recall being anything other than Uriel. Mab admits to being human once. Odin is a demi-god at best.
But Uriel seems to be under the impression that he has always been Uriel, never being either a mortal host or another powerful entity. Its as if Uriel, mantle or Grace or what have you, has always been an Archangel guarding Creation. So did he and the others shape the faith by their existence? Or did the faith shape them, and they were nothing like they are now?
He could have always been an Aeon serving a higher Aeon that he sees as the Creator Aeon. But that would mean he isn't aware of there being a higher Aeon. Yet we know there are different branches of this theoretical pantheon/tree of Aeons. Does that mean his memory if flawed, or shaped to be that way by TWG of the Dresdenverse?
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version