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See That Turtle Of Enormous Girth? - Sotha Sil's Totem

Tags: #Dunmer  #Sotha Sil 
  • July 27, 2017

    Sotha Sil and The Turtle

     

     

     

    Those of you who play ESO may have noticed these little turtle\haj mota idols dotted around Vvardefall. You can find them in a few places but always in temples. This one pictured above is the most obvious one. You can find it at the Shrine of Sotha Sil at the Temple in the City of Vivec. Since it was sitting at Seht's shrine I assume it is in some way related to him but since there is no in-game lore about turtles or haj mota I decided to google some real world turtle mythology. Here is some that stood out to me.

    In Sufism, the hatching of baby turtles as they run into the sea signifies joining with God\the universe. You could see some parallels with that and Seht's Anuic\Magnuic philosophy. It also makes me think of another real-world totem that gets a lot of play in Elder Scrolls. The Scarab. The scarab lays its eggs in a ball of dung that the young will then eat its way out of when they hatch. To the ancient Egyptians and Gnostics, this was seen as signifying a beings escape from the mundane world.

    In Vedic religion, Kurma is a God who takes the shape of a giant turtle that holds the cosmos on his back. He also stabilises it when the other gods churn the cosmic milk into nectar so that they can drink it and become immortal. If you google a picture of a Kurma idol, it kind of looks exactly like the one seen in ESO.

    In ancient Mesopotamian Myth, the turtle is an emblem of the God Enki\Ea. Enki is a god that I have long thought was an inspiration for Sotha Sil. He is a god of magic, crafting, intelligence, water and semen. His realm is a huge underground sea and he helps the new gods eventually overthrow the old gods. Also, Enki is associated with the "hieros gamos" which is:

     a sacred marriage where divine principles in the form of dualistic opposites came together as male and female to give birth to the cosmos.

    So, even tho there isn't any in-game lore that can point to the significance of the turtle\haj mota, there is a lot of IRL lore you can pull from. Although, you can still take a guess at some more mundane reason of why Seht would be associated with this totem. A turtle can represent stability, silence, caution and the literal ability to retract into one's self. All things the Lord of Mystery preaches in his Truth in Sequence sermons s well as both being associated with water. 

  • Member
    July 27, 2017

    There's a god of semen? :D I wonder if he looks like multitudes of homunculi, each like a glimmering rope through the water? I like this, Veloth. Naryu's Journal has the Warden from the trailer refer to Seht as the Dunmer's nature god, an abstraction I hadn't considered ever. Having a turtle as a totem helps me bend my head around it more :)

  • July 27, 2017

    Paws said:

    There's a god of semen? :D I wonder if he looks like multitudes of homunculi, each like a glimmering rope through the water? I like this, Veloth. Naryu's Journal has the Warden from the trailer refer to Seht as the Dunmer's nature god, an abstraction I hadn't considered ever. Having a turtle as a totem helps me bend my head around it more :)

    Yeah, it makes sense that a god of creating would also be a fertility god and therefore a nature god and if he was already associated with water then specifically sperm lol. I love the idea of Seht as a nature god, if he built his city to reshape Nirn it makes sense that the Dunmer would associate him with the changing of nature and its mathematical precision.

    I also really like the idea of ALMSIVI having idols associated with them since their inspirations also have them. It just makes sense that they would want their own.