Board Thread:Lore Discussion/@comment-82.209.153.208-20140328221319/@comment-1255618-20190322171112

I think that it's worth pointing out here that the Elder Scrolls universe (like real life) is full of unreliable or biased narrators and different views about the universe's cosmology. The idea of CHIM and to a much lesser extent the Godhead have support in-universe, and characters like Vivec and Mankar Camoran talk about these topics, but both of those characters are unreliable narrators for reasons too numerous to list here, and even if they are partially right it doesn't logically follow that they are completely right and have figured out the whole truth. It is perfectly possible to stumble onto powerful magic and still be right for the wrong reasons.

Vivec's philosophy in particular is kind of a New Age take on the "Monomyth" which unites all mannish and merish theologies to a greater or lesser extent; while a few similarly recognizable elements show up in the Beastfolk's theologies (and we can even throw in the views of the Redguards, Skaal, or even the Dark Brotherhood to a lesser extent), their myths tend to be much more "out there" and more heavily contradict the views of the others. So Vivec is not only an unreliable narrator because of who he is and his motives, but because of the fact that alongside his specific experiences he's also extrapolating his views from the dominant traditional mystical tradition of the Elder Scrolls universe which has some built-in assumptions, and to boot the Dark Elven variant of this tradition which is heavily biased towards autonomy, individualism, and rebellion against cosmic authority. We don't even know what the views of the Psijic Order are, and Vivec seems extremely biased against them (they being High Elves and him being a Dark Elf making this unsurprising) even though they, like him, seem to understand secrets about the universe that few or no others do. And the Dwemer vanished altogether so everyone both in-universe and in the fandom speculates about what they knew that no one else does.

To further trip your mind up, one thing I was thinking about recently was that if the Godhead supposedly precedes both Anu and Padomay, the fundamental principles of existence ("Is") and non-existence ("Is Not") respectively that supposedly underpin the reality of the Elder Scrolls Universe, then can the Godhead be definitely said to exist at all? So if the Godhead is outside the dichotomy of Anu and Padomay, then is it just conceptual nonsense? Maybe the Godhead neither exists nor does not exist, which is a crazy concept. If this is the case, then the Godhead is less "God" in the traditional sense than other powerful entities in the Elder Scrolls universe, and may even be just one of many equally probable explanations for the reality. Trippy, huh?

Of course, because Vivec's views on metaphysics are mostly the only in-depth views about the subject we're aware of, the lore community tends to gravitate towards his explanations by default, although as new lore emerges alternative explanations are emerging as well. Vivec also tends to serve as a mouthpiece for one writer's (Michael Kirkbride's) views about the nature of the Elder Scrolls reality, which may sometimes also contradict Vivec's.

So I hope you found this long-winded explanation helpful, @Ottoman Hold! :)