This week on Written in Uncertainty, we’re discussing a mysterious character, who has been working behind the scenes of Mundus in general and Morrowind in particular, bringing change to the world and hopefully, maybe, keeping it on a steady course. Or he could simply be a liar who wanted to maintain his godhood, whatever the cost. Today we’re asking, who is Sotha Sil?
Sotha Sil in Brief
Sotha Sil was one of the members of the Dunmeri Tribunal, three Chimer who tapped the Heart of Lorkhan in the First Era to make themselves gods. Sotha Sil was probably the brains behind this, working out how to use the Hearth of Lorkhan to that end. How he got there is a little bit of a mystery, particularly if you compare it to Vivec’s rise. He was a member of House Sotha, whose stronghold was destroyed by Mehrunes Dagon. Sotha Sil was the sole survivor of the attack, if we are to believe one of his Clockwork Apostles, rescued by Vivec. This apparently happened before either of them were gods, and potentially also before either of them came to prominence. It feels quite weird for a street urchin and a scion of a decimated house to rise to become advisors of the hortator, but that’s the story we have. We know even less about how Sotha Sil did it than how Vivec managed it, alas.
Perhaps appropriately, Sotha Sil fulfils the role of Mystery in the Tribunal, and is anticipated by Azura. This puts Sil in the place of the between, the “maybe”, which we’ll get to later, and the “now”. He has also, like his Anticipation, taken his role in shaping the Dunmer people. He was the one who persuaded the Dunmer to accept their changed skin after he figured out how to use Kagrenac’s tools, for example. To quote Vivec’s text, The Battle of Red Mountain:
The Dunmer were at first afraid of their new faces, but Sotha Sil spoke to them, saying that it was not a curse but a blessing, a sign of their changed natures, and sign of the special favor they might enjoy as New Mer, no longer barbarians trembling before ghosts and spirits, but civilized mer, speaking directly to their immortal friends and patrons, the three faces of the Tribunal.
The same text also puts Sotha Sil as the one who was being uplifting about the change, and talking back to Azura after she cursed the Dunmer, according to Vivec’s account. Which is interesting, given his viewpoints in The Elder Scrolls: Online, of Mundus as a place under threat that he needs to shore up. Although he does seem to be one of few people in The Elder Scrolls as a whole who seems to be interested in progress, and moving forward. That would potentially account for why he accepted the change in its entirety, rather than rejecting it or partially taking it on like Almalexia and Vivec.
Sotha Sil as a god
His role as Mystery in the Tribunal almost feels at odds with his character, at least as it’s presented in ESO. We’ll get to that later, but for now it links to his being the anticipation of Azura, being in the twilight, the place of both and none, and the in-between space. This feels more like Vivec in some ways, but in this case not being one or the other is a representation of uncertainty, rather than the Mastery that we see in Vivec.
As a member of the Tribunal, what we see of Seht is fairly minimal; his followers almost seem to be monolatristic, in that they acknowledge Vehk and Ayem, but only consider Seht worthy of worship. He himself, however, doesn’t seem to much care for divinity now that he has it. Given his deterministic view, it feels like he almost did what he did to Nerevar and the rest of the Tribunal because he considered it necessary. He is willing to be pretty much anything that he believes is required for the survival of Nirn. In ESO, he says this:
I am whatever the people need me to be. A guardian. An oppressor. For some, too distant. For others, too meddlesome. I am the canvas upon which they paint their dreams and resentments. A vessel for their hopes and doubts.
A mirror. Nothing more.
From that, he seems to be willing to be anything. Which makes me wonder, given the presentation we have in ESO. It’s not very “godlike”, he’s more an engrossed tinkerer than a divine engineer, in my view. I don’t see the character that we have in ESO as one willing to set up the infrastructure of his own cult, unless there’s more to him and it than we see in the games. The quote you just heard shows that there’s a range of reactions to him, rather than what he actually does. He’s also ready to doubt his divinity in a way that seems antithetical to the Tribunal Temple. He openly says that he does not call himself a god in ESO, and in the unlicensed text Sotha Sil’s Last Words, he says he is a god, quote “as surely as others are”.
That is a nod to the Tribunal as a whole, but I think it’s more than that. Vivec’s 36 Lessons present “the only true god, I”, which Seht could be referencing here. So everyone is potentially a god, and so Seht is potentially a god too. I think that’s where it’s potentially going, because of some little nuggets we see in his cult’s writings, particularly the Truth in Sequence. Volume 1 says this about the Second Nirn, derived from the first. To quote:
Our lessers know the Source as two forms: Anu and Padomay, but this binary is without merit. One of the Lorkhan’s Great Lies, meant to sunder us from the truth of Anuic unity. Our father, Sotha Sil, would have us know the truth: there is no Padomay. Padomay is the absence of value. The lack. A ghost that vanishes at first light. A Nothing. There is only Anu, sundered and known by many names, possessing many faces. The one.
To me, this feels a lot like the acknowledgement that Anu is the universe, that the interplay that went on between Anu and Padomay is in fact going on inside Anu’s dream. This is also mentioned in Sermon 35, where, to quote “This is clearly attested by ANU and his double, which love knows never really happened”. These hint at the possibility that Anu is in fact all the universe, and ties into the idea of the Amaranth. In brief, that’s the idea that Anu is dreaming/hallucinating the whole universe of The Elder Scrolls, caused by a form of deep sensory deprivation over his grief at Nir’s death. I have done a whole podcast on the Amaranth, if you want a more detailed discussion of what it is and how it works, check that out. The key thing here is that, as Seht is aware of that reality, he may be ready to consider the potential divinity or potential for transcendence in everyone on Nirn.
Sotha Sil & Transformation
While that may be the reality, Sotha Sil’s cult seems to be into the improvement of Nirn, making it better than it currently is, what they call Nirn-Ensuing, which is contrasted with a flawed Nirn-Prior. This is not the same thing as the Amaranth, creating a new next world, but making the current world new, a rebirth through the medium of the Clockwork City. The city itself appears to be a model for Nirn.
However, it’s more than a model. If we listen to Almalexia, it’s potentially a tool for the transformation of Nirn. In creating the Clockwork City, Sotha Sil has a tool to manipulate in order to affect change in the world at large. This is a principle that’s part of esoteric and magical traditions in this world, the idea of “as above, so below”. The best example of this is a “voodoo doll”, you break the doll of a person and it breaks the person who it represents. It’s possible that in changing the Clockwork City, Sotha Sil can work change on Mundus. This is the same way that the Ayleids modelled the White-Gold Tower after the wheel-and-tower model of the Aurbis, that the Nu-Mantia Intercept calls a “sympathetic megafetish”. “Fetish” in this sense meaning a thing that symbolises something else. Like the voodoo doll.
This isn’t actually attested anywhere explicitly, but it’s a possibility, I think. It also possibly exists as an idea in-universe, too. Carlovac Townway’s historical fiction 2920, the Last Year of the First Era, ends on this note:
In the smoky catacombs beneath the city where Sotha Sil forged the future with his arcane clockwork apparatus, something unforeseen happened. An oily bubble seeped from a long trusted gear and popped. Immediately, the wizard’s attention was drawn to it and to the chain that tiny action triggered. A pipe shifted half an inch to the left. A tread skipped. A coil rewound itself and began spinning in a counter direction. A piston that had been thrusting left-right, left-right, for millennia suddenly began shifting right-left. Nothing broke, but everything changed.
The machine is clearly responding to the changing of the era, and adapting. So we have some sort of feedback loop between the Clockwork City and Nirn as a whole.
However, I don’t know entirely how this fits with what we see in Elder Scrolls: Legends. In that game, Sotha Sil has rebuilt a replica of Lorkhan’s heart, complete with replica Dwemer tools to manipulate it. Quite why he would do that (apart from lazy writing on the developers’ part, but eh) I’m not sure, given that the Clockwork City is a model of Nirn as a whole. Is it possible that the Heart is not destroyed after all, and Sotha Sil is building what is actually there? Or maybe he wants to have the world as he would want it to be? I’m not sure it fits either of those answers. Or maybe I’m just overthinking it. Maybe the Clockwork City was simply made to replicate Nirn at the point it was built, and it hasn’t or can’t adjust to being without Lorkhan’s heart as part of it.
There’s also a part of me that can’t help but think of Yawgmoth, a big bad in the Magic: the Gathering universe. In that, Yawgmoth started as a doctor who was essentially treating a form of magical cancer, but his ultimate solution is the entire transformation of sentient beings into something else. He also dwells in the middle of a plane called Phyrexia, which is a hybrid of natural and artificial, in a constant cycle of “improvement”. The only real difference between Sotha Sil and Yawgmoth seems to be that Yawgmoth is expansionist, while Seht is happy to sit in a corner of Tamriel and tinker away. Apart from that, not much separates them. They are both especially keen on machines as distinct from natural things.
Is Sotha Sil Deterministic?
The focus on machinery and gears lends a deterministic air to Sotha Sil at a thematic level. He claims that his actions are “locked in time” and “determined by chains of action and consequence.” This is despite numerous references that his followers make to possibility and potential at the heart of what Sotha Sil does, and Luciano Pullo claims that Seht prepares for every possibility.
This seems contradictory, I mean why prepare for everything if everything is deterministic? This is, I think essentially a nod to Chaos Theory. That is, deterministic systems which have small differences in how they start, produce large differences in the end result. Everything is still cause and effect, but thanks to the differences in initial conditions, feedback loops and other mechanics, true prediction is impossible. So if Seht views the world in those terms, he still needs to prepare for many different eventualities.
Given that outlook, and the way he talks about “maybe” as something to cherish in ESO, there’s part of me that thinks he regrets his level of knowledge. He sees everything in deterministic terms, but wants what he thinks is impossible, that maybe. It seems like he wants ignorance and, maybe, innocence again. When you take that with his comments about himself and Vivec being bound by regret, I would read into that that Seht regrets killing Nerevar. Presenting it as inevitable is a way of absolving himself from guilt, as he has no agency in the matter in that case, and therefore no blame.
As well as determinism, the focus on machines means that Seht is typically more materialistic than the other Triunes. He’s focused on this world, and preserving this world. He knows about the deeper realities of Mundus, better than most characters, if not all. However, he claimed that he “only [sees] unsteady walls” when asked about moving beyond cause and effect. Despite being immensely powerful, he is not able to move beyond the limits of the material, and become a Prisoner who can dictate the course of a Prophesied Event. He knows what the reality of his situation is, but is unable to escape it. In a way, he’s quite a tragic figure.
Sotha Sil & Memory
He’s also associated with memory by the fanbase. The Clockwork City mirrors this; Mournhold is built on Old Mournhold, which is built on a Dwemer ruin, which is built on a Daedric ruin. The present is likewise built on the past , and memories. It’s likely not a coincidence that the lower levels of the city are flooded, as a character in ESO explicitly links water to memory. The city of Mournhold itself replicates this structure.
Sotha Sil’s goal, exemplified by how his city is an evolution of things, seems to be almost transhumanist, if I can use the term. While he is incapable of moving beyond Mundus, he is making the current one better, potentially moving it into something else, the Nirn-Ensuing, transforming the people and the world in the process. In this, he potentially shares at least part of an implied goal with the Psijic Order. The text The Old Ways has this perspective on divinity:
The Daedra and gods to whom the common people turn are no more than the spirits of superior men and women whose power and passion granted them great influence in the afterworld.
We don’t know for sure how much Sotha Sil shares the Psijics’ philosophy, but he definitely spent some time there. If you believe Carlovac Townway, he was a tutor with them. It certainly seems possible that, given what we talked about earlier with his thoughts on his own godhood, he may share a similar perspective to this. So it’s possible that he could be into pushing people and the world into the “beyond” to have that power and influence. However, he only seems to be interested in the “big picture”; while he says himself that some may consider him too meddlesome, the overwhelming impression is that he is more absent than present. So it’s likely that he’s more fussed with the overall state of Nirn, rather than individuals.
Backing this up, the book Inveigling the Clockwork Apostles describes the relationship between as, to quote, “rather like needy students with a particularly distant teacher.” Sil is trying to get his apostles to build things, to experiment and promote different ideas, picking up on what he sees as the best ideas. This feels like he’s essentially trying to run an R&D department, to collect all possible good ideas and make use of them for his project. Which, according to himself, is reinforcing the, quote, “unsteady walls” that is Mundus. If this is true, then he, like Vivec, sees people as a means, rather than an end in themselves.
And that’s all I have to say about Sotha Sil for now. Mer, god and aiming to be something beyond both. He feels like the most well-intentioned, or at least the most self-aware of the Tribunal. Sotha Sil remains approachable but inscrutable, looking at the horizon more than any other character in TES. Maybe that’s what he wants, though. To be able to deal with people on a more impersonal level, cutting himself off from the them feels like a good start. Sotha Sil seems like one of the more logical and sympathetic of the Tribunal, but he’s also the one most likely to treat people like cogs in a machine. I think this is probably best summed up by Sotha Sil’s Last Words. In that, he declares that he is “its only citizen”, and while that may be a little outdated given the teeming inhabitants of the Clockwork City we see in The Elder Scrolls Online, it underscores the fact that they don’t have much of a say in what goes on the city. Seht’s word is law there, and he is controlled by the grinding of destiny, as much as anything else. Which is possibly more scary than being controlled by a tyrant. There’s no negotiating with fate, so there’s likely little to negotiate with Sotha Sil.
That’s all for now. Next time, we’ll finish our look at the Tribunal with a dive into who and what Almalexia is.
Although.. If you have a few minutes to spare, please hit me up on this thread with your experiences and opinions on how the lore community has changed and responded to events in the community over the years in this post. It’s for an article I’m working on for the Tel Mora Independent Press.
Until then, this podcast remains a letter written in uncertainty.
