Board Thread:Lore Discussion/@comment-62.31.43.199-20131118141224/@comment-24590102-20140321075054

Thanks for the heads-up about Xal not being Dwemer. I probably got that mixed up with Yagrum Bagarn. That leaves the Marukhati Selective as a secret society who are labeled as a bunch of fanatics with a reputation which is not underpinned by verifiable evidence; much like the Thalmor having claimed to bring back the moons. The Thalmor did do their thing. The moons did come back. But "it ain't necessarily so." When considering the activities and effects of Selective, as a problem of evidence, this is only exacerbated by the fact that they were a secret society. That makes everything we hear about them suspect. For example, how can we know that the "fanaticism" of the Selective is not wanton vilification given that the sect is secretive and may choose to embrace whatever lies help it to keep its secrets?

Where were you when the Dragon Broke? is a text written by various authors who were outside observers of the dragonbreaks - people who could and would interpret what they observed, or heard tell of, according to their own experience and beliefs. The bottom line of this text, BTW, is an "easter egg" reference to a very famous and well known concept of Hermeticism:

"Marukh showed us all the glories of the Dawn so that we might learn, simply: as above, so below." (which goes to my argument on the other thread that there is more than one point of view, in TES, concerning the "gods" and what they are or, for that matter, if they are.)

However, Where were you when the Dragon Broke? documents, rather than facts known to have affected this timeline, a collection of hearsay taken across the many timelines of the Dragonbreak - all of it potentially true but not necessarily true of the specific timeline in which TES takes place. E.g.

"According to Hestra, Cyrodiil became an Empire across the stars. According to Shor-El, Cyrodiil became an egg. Most say something in a language they can only speak sideways."

Although the first two statements (above) can be true in the same 2-dimensional time domain, they cannot both be true in the same thread of 2-dimensional time. The last statement in the above quote is more than likely an ingame reference to the phenomenon of interpretation - which brings us back to the various authors of Where were you when the Dragon Broke? - who are people speaking through the preconceptions of their culture in its stage of historical development. It's definitely a mythological aspect of lore but it's not necessarily factual (and all good mythology is true in its themes rather than in its facts).

There are a number of other texts mentioning the Marukhati Selective:

Vindication for the Dragon Break

...the Tower

Vehk's Teaching

Final Report to Trebonius

Where Were You When the Dragon Broke?: Longer Version (this is particularly interesting as it suggests that the Marakhuti Selectives achieved their ends by doctoring the evidence - which speaks to their character and the reliability of their testimony in the absence of verifiable facts.)

All of this material strikes me as mythology, cosmology and interpretations thereof applied to an event none of the authors are equipped to understand. And that is what leaves us very much in the dark. Suffice it to say that it is conceivable that the Dwemer did use Numidium as a gateway to somewhere-else where, presumably, they could exist in peace. However, it is not admissible that a secret organisation did anything of the sort. By way of comparative example - take RSA encryption. The British secret service claimed to have developed this years before it's independent development and publication by academics. However, thanks to the Official Secrets Act, there is no accessible factual evidence by which the claim of the secret service can be made admissible - and so the credit duly belongs to the academics who can yield up hard evidence (being their seminal publication of this concept).

If the effects of Marukhati Selective activities lack hard, factual evidence, then this alone renders them irrelevant to the unfolding of history by transforming them into an unnecessary entity in the explanation of that history. This is highly relevant because the most parsimonious explanation is always truest to the facts. Therein lies the inherent problem of all secret societies; other than their existance, assuming evidence for this exists, nothing else is admissible.

