Board Thread:Lore Discussion/@comment-62.31.43.199-20140124070928/@comment-24590102-20140326032837

Contributor 62 wrote: [...] Quite interesting. As if Jyggalag was little more than an alter ego of Sheogorath born from the mad caves of his ancient mind and which overwhelms his personality from time to time, until someone helped him accept and deal with shit?... mmmh...

And what of the questions and considerations from Wikia Contributor 108 here above, regarding the possibility of a Dwemer\Jyggalag relation? Well, careful, there - alter ego is a temperament-specific interpretation of phenomena such as that which arises from emotional repression. It's a bit like the way a certain modern philosopher described competitionism in terms of status anxiety - only competition is more about the status than the anxiety, whereas the anxiety is more than likely an artefact of the mindset of someone trying to understand competitionism from outside the temperament in question. If you look at Socionics and Myer-Briggs temperament systems, both are exactly the same but use different expression which winds up being temperament specific - so some people understand one and not the other while for others, it's vice-versa. :^)   In terms of the whole Jekyll & Hyde syndrome with its attached passive-aggression and obsessive-compulsive aspects, I think you'll find that this has more to do with personality traits which are more heavily influenced by anger/equalisation mechanisms than esteem/status mechanisms.

But Dwemer and Jyggalag/Sheogorath? Firstly, rather than gods of "order and logic" I recall it was gods of "reason and logic" which is somewhat of a tautology attributed to the Dwemer by people for whom the absence of gods is inconceivable (e.g. see The Battle of Red Mountain). Oh, what a can of worms this one is! :^) Sophistry and theology are limited to reason/logic because sophistry is about bending perceptions in spite of the facts while theology is about creating the perception of a truth for which there are no probative facts. Neither developed new technologies (such as the arch) and neither can be used to do something practical like building a bridge because the missing ingredient is evidence in the form of verifiable facts.

Contrary to the characteristically theistic interpretation of the Dwemer, these people had machinery (which is to say they had gone considerably further than just building bridges). Based on the ongoing activities at Dwemer ruins (even after they've been cleared) the Dwemer must have some deeply buried automated manufacturing plants maintained by their animunculi which mass produce replacement animunculi - hence the reactivation of many stations and posts assigned to animunculi in those ruins. The conservation of energy concept, thermodynamics and machine tools necessary for this level of technological development are the hallmarks of industrialisation - which is not a product of "logic and reason" but of "evidence and reason". It must always be remembered that, for political reasons, the theistic observer will want to avoid drawing attention to the one hole in the theistic world-view (namely evidence) and so can be prone to characterise the products of a more secular or "profane" approach as being of "reason and logic" which are more in the image of the theology underpinning the theistic world-view - and I must applaud Bethesda/Zenimax for getting that one right.

Powerful meddlers (whether potential or otherwise), such as Jyggalag would not have been viewed as a compatible god or even identified with by an industrialised people but, rather, such entities would have been tagged as a threat to be managed, destroyed or fled from. If anything, I think that Jyggalag might have contributed to a motivation for the Dwemer to flee Nirn due to the destructive tendencies of his obsessive-compulsive activities - assuming that the power of Jyggalag, reduced as it was by imprisonment within Sheogorath, was sufficient to cause the Dwemer alarm. However, given a certain Dwemer notoriety for teasing and toying with the Daedra, I suspect that they might have felt more threatened by what the Falmer did in Skyrim - and the implications this had for the risks associated with living among theistic cultures.