Today on Written in Uncertainty we’re discussing a puzzle that most people seem to have an opinion on, if not an informed answer. We’re discussing a trend that has split societies, transformed gods and turned the course of wars, all while being something that seems to be frowned upon but not quite illegal for much of Tamriel’s history. Today we’re asking, why worship a Daedra?
Daedric Description
First of all, a quick recap of what the Daedra are. The Daedra are those spirits, members of the et’ada, that refused to take any part in the creation of Mundus. They instead made realms out of themselves in Oblivion. The book Aedra and Daedra highlights a few big differences:
“Aedra created the mortal world and are bound to the Earth Bones. Daedra, who cannot create, have the power to change.
As part of the divine contract of creation, the Aedra can be killed. Witness Lorkhan and the moons.
The protean Daedra, for whom the rules do not apply, can only be banished.”
So the Daedra in theory have little to connect them to the world, little to give in the way of benefit to mortals. I appreciate that this is now diving in on the assumption that worship is some sort of quid pro quo arrangement, where you worship a god in return for their material or spiritual favour, which shouldn’t immediately be the case. I think there are three core reasons that the Daedra are worshipped, of which power is only one. The others are because of a long-standing tradition, and also because of a personal preference for the lifestyle that a Daedra worshipper leads. I’ll go through each of these in turn.
I should note before I get started that the Chimer have examples of all of these reasons, so they’ll be quite a common example that I bring up.
Deadra Worship for Power
The Daedra can provide their worshippers with power, what with one thing and another. This is quite commonly done through artefacts, although Phrastus of Elinhir seems to think that:
Most often this power comes in the form of knowledge, the most seductive and least perilous-seeming of the Daedric temptations.
I think this is a little biased, possibly along Phrastus’ own desires. Not all Daedra offer knowledge, the only one that I can immediately think of in that space is Hermaeous Mora. Artefacts remain the most visible sign of Daedric power in the games, and one that is brought up in the book Modern Heretics as one of several reasons to worship them. These are objects of immense power, although they tend to come with caveats or, if you believe the book Famed Artefacts of Tamriel, most will disappear after a time of their own will.
These things are offered as prizes by the Daedra because they want to be worshipped, want to be appreciated by those on Tamriel. According to Shezarr’s Song in The Monomyth:
“So the Daedra Lords created the Daedric Realms, and all the ranks of Lesser Daedra, great and small. And, for the most part, the Daedra Lords were well pleased with this arrangement, for they always had worshippers and servants and playthings close to hand. But, at the same time, they sometimes looked with envy upon the Mortal Realms, for though mortals were foul and feeble and contemptible, their passions and ambitions were also far more surprising and entertaining than the antics of the Lesser Daedra. Thus do the Daedra Lords court and seduce certain amusing specimens of the Mortal Races, especially the passionate and powerful. It gives the Daedra Lords special pleasure to steal away from Shezarr and the Aedra the greatest and most ambitious mortals.
This explains why the Daedra interact with the mortals on Mundus, and why those with lots of power and ability to make change on their own terms would worship the Daedra; it’s a way for the powerful to get more power, even if it isn’t necessarily on their own terms.
However, that doesn’t explain why your average person would worship the Daedra. These people don’t have much chance of getting the artefacts that would enhance their power. I think they’re hoping for some more mundane blessing, similar to their interactions with the Aedra. We have this from Lady Cinnabar’s rebuttal to Phrastus:
On the contrary, it’s easy to show that veneration for Daedra is widespread and widely accepted among the folk of Tamriel, despite the desires and opinions of priests and professors. Ask the hunter why he mutters a prayer to Hircine as he draws his bow. Ask the gardener why she asks Mephala to spare her vines from slugs and worms. Ask the guardsman why he invokes the valor of Boethiah as he draws his sword. And one doesn’t have to look hard to find worshipers of Sanguine during Carnaval, or Hermaeus Mora among scholars at any time.
This seems to indicate what I would call “folk belief”, the idea that the Daedra are invoked for small blessings here and there that are intended to help people with their day-to-day endeavours or bless their profession, like a patron saint. It’s not really “worship” in the usual way that we define it, more an invocation of the Daedra in some transactional exchange. However, if this is true then it runs a little counter to scholarly opinion; Daedra aren’t part of creation, and therefore can’t easily influence it. But we, as players, probably feel and know that that’s rubbish. The Daedra can and do interact with Nirn, and not in the way that Cinnabar talks about. Although again, it’s one step removed from Nirn’s physics to manipulate artefacts and worshippers, while Cinnabar’s examples suggest that the Daedra are influencing physics directly. There’s also several stories of the Daedra requiring something for their aid, which isn’t referenced here. These almost feel beneath the Daedra to actually do, unless there’s some broader goal in mind.
If we think about power more broadly, demonstrations of power can show that the Daedra are capable of effecting change more than the Aedra. We have this line from Else God-Hater in Oblivion:
“The gods don’t do a damn thing. Do they even exist? How could anyone tell? Daedra Lords, sure. They exist. They do things. Bad things, mostly, but things you can see. The gods? They don’t do a damn thing.
This is quite easy for us to put the lie to, given what Akatosh does at the end of Oblivion, but from an in-universe perspective, it’s understandable. With the Aedra and other gods distant, the Daedra are an option for worship simply because they leave a mark on the world that’s more generally visible.
Perhaps a less-appreciated form of power is the Daedra’s ability to change their worshippers through interaction with them. This is how the Chimer saw the House of Troubles; they were testing gods, to be overcome and to make people better for it. That is, in fact, the entire reason that Veloth and his disciples left the Summerset Isles in the first place. Various sources say that the life of the Aldmer of Summerset had become “decadent”, that Veloth wanted a “pure” or more ascetic way of life, and so he embarked on a path of deliberate hardship to travel to Morrowind and worship Daedra.
The House of Troubles perform this task of transformation to the Chimer; they are there to teach lessons to their worshippers, which will make them into better people for the suffering, potentially gods if you believe books like The Fall of Trinimac which state that was the entire reason for the Chimer leaving Summerset. This is reflective of a real-world reality; true change is painful. If you want to lose weight, you have to eat less, exercise more, or both. If you want a promotion, you need to work harder than your current job requires. I’ve seen this described in Elder Scrolls lingo as “cutting yourself into a better shape”, which is also a lot of what is going on with Vivec and Molag Bal in Sermon 14 of the 36 Lessons. The biting of “new shapes” into their spears is representing Vivec using Molag Bal to attain knowledge, potentially of CHIM, a word which the Prince states in the sermon.
Mankar Camoran implies something similar through the Commentaries on the Mysterium Xarxes, where he equates the worship of Mehrunes Dagon with reshaping yourself from ‘protonymic’ to the state of Liberty that is Nu-Mantia. That’s also partly the worship of the Magna-Ge, I think, but Dagon worship is the main driver here. I need to get my head around the Commentaries a bit more to precisely parse it out, but that’s the overall feeling that I get from them; that the correct worship of Dagon brings self-transformation that can bring about Liberty, which is… something else. You’ll typically see it pointed towards either CHIM or Amaranth, particularly as Mankar mentions CHIM in the Commentaries. However, I don’t know precisely that I’d equate Liberty with CHIM just for that. Liberty gets linked to Mehrunes, Paradise and other explicitly Deadric concerns, rather than CHIM as such.
Camoran does give a more straightforward reason to worship the Daedra, because of power, but their own, not what they can offer their devotee. They are more worthy because they are more primal, more original:
the Daedra are the true gods of this universe. Julianos and Dibella and Stendarr are all Lorkhan’s betrayers, posing as divinities in a principality that has lost its guiding light. What are Scholarship, Love, and Mercy when compared to Fate, Night, and Destruction? The gods you worship are trifling shadows of First Causes.
There is a reason for that, which we’ll get to a little later, but just remember for now that the Daedra seem to appeal to more primal instincts than the Aedra, which is linked to what they can do, more than what they can offer a worshipper. This may be worship out of fear, but it may also be a simple acknowledgement that they are the most powerful beings around. This is similar, in a way, to how God responds to Job’s laments in the Bible. God’s response to Job’s point that he has done nothing wrong and still has been punished is essentially one of power; most of the verses are “who are you to question what I do? If you know so much, show ME how to run the universe!” By Mankar’s logic, and Else’s too, I guess, is that the Daedra can hold you in their power very easily, and so deserve worship because “might makes right”.
Mankar also makes an appeal to truth in his claim that Lorkhan is a Daedra, and that Tamriel is Mehrunes Dagon’s “birthright”. That would make Daedra worship the actual truth of the matter. We don’t have a lot else on this beyond Camoran’s claims, that the Aedra are traitorous spirits that betrayed a Daedra prince, but it does seem to a few things that we see in The Elder Scrolls, most particularly hints that Lorkhan isn’t really dead or entirely absent.
Daedra Worship as Tradition
This is the main driver behind the Chimer for much of their history, so far as I can tell. It falls under the broader category of ancestor worship, which actually makes up a surprising proportion of worship in TES in general. There was some comments in the Redguard Forum Madness that suggested that the Dunmer started to see the Daedra as their actual ancestors. This is referenced in the book Aedra and Daedra, which says that, quote:
This distinction [between ancestor/not ancestor] was crucial to the Dunmer, whose fundamental split in ideology is represented in their mythical genealogy.
The Chimer/Dunmer aren’t the only culture that sees the Daedra as their ancestors, either. The orcs have a direct ideological and ancestral link to the Daedra. Some orcs claim Malacath or Mauloch as their ancestor as well, although his exact status in their view is a little foggy. We understand Malacath as a Daedra, but we have this quote from from Lawrence Shick, Zenimax Writers AMA:
Some Orcs in the Covenant have been deliberately referring to Malacath as Mauloch so as to sort-of whitewash the fact that they worship a Daedric Prince. What, Mauloch, a Daedric Prince? No, not a bit of it!
This shows that these Daggerfall Covenant orcs are intent on ancestor worship, but not Deadra worship as such. Their attitude to the more “traditional” story of Malacath’s origins is telling, as well; they consider it heresy that their god-ancestor was created from a Trinimac that Boethiah mutilated, instead holding that Mauloch did it to himself. This looks rather like the only real example of reluctant Daedra worship, so to speak; the entity under worship is not disputed, but its precise nature is.
Despite being their ancestors, the Chimer and Dunmer have a rather more utilitarian view of the Daedra. The Chimeri exiles settled in Vvardenfell, and continued worshipping the Good Daedra and using the House of Troubles as a foil to make them into better people, but this may have ultimately become a habit, if you believe the Tribunal. In Vivec’s recounting of the Battle of Red Mountain, Sotha Sil was said to state that, to quote “The old gods [the Daedra] are cruel and arbitrary, and distant from the hopes and fears of mer.” Seht is claiming here that the Daedra are no longer “working” for the Dunmer, that they are not improving them.
We also get the sense, from the book Invocation of Azura, that the Dunmer or maybe the Chimer worshipped the Daedra out of a sense of familial duty, even those for whom the worship is banned. The author, Sigillah Parate, joined her grandmother’s cult of Molag Bal, seemingly because it was her grandmother’s cult. The fact that it was illegal doesn’t seem to bother Sigiliah at all. This is reiterated in Modern Heretics, which states that:
Some more traditional Daedra-worshippers are motivated by piety and personal conviction
That personal piety and conviction typically goes against society in some way, particularly given the slant that Modern Heretics puts on things. Unlike the Aedra, the Daedra do not typically have values that support a stable society. Even in the case of the Chimer, if you look at the virtues espoused by Boethiah, Mephala and Azura, they’re mostly about overthrow, plotting and stealth. Those are values that will help a revolutionary movement survive and succeed, but aren’t conducive to producing a stable society. The Tribunal reshaped Dunmeri society to produce just those virtues; humility, generosity, grace, daring and the rest,which are essentially about stability, with the capacity to take risks where required, but otherwise being quite unified.
Daedra Worship as Personal Preference
Sigiliah is a great case of the next reason for worshipping a Daedra; that of personal preference. Throughout her book, she is after the Daedra that cares for her, values what she can contribute. She goes through a wide range of Daedra, and her reasons for rejecting them are personal, rather than related to her faith. She leaves Molag Bal because the worship of Bal killed her grandmother. She leaves the cult of Boethiah because “Boethiah cared little for her cultists-she only cared for our blood.” She goes to Nocturnal initially because “At last I had found the personal mistress I had so long desired,” but leaves when she, quote “recognized the futility of unraveling her [Nocturnal’s] enigmas”, and goes to Azura because she “is the only Daedra Princess I have ever worshipped who seems to care about her followers” Sigilah is worshipping the Daedra that gives her the greatest sense of self-worth and validation. She doesn’t really care about power, or even principle, really. It’s all about her personal preference.
It’s the same with Aela the Huntress in the Harbingers in Skyrim. She carries on being a werewolf and worshipping Hircine because that’s what she enjoys doing. It’s down to lifestyle choice, rather than any real absolute “truth” as such. Part of this is I think a consequence of having multiple gods that are obviously present, but we don’t see much in the way of strict polytheism in Daedric worship outside of the Chimer or Dunmer. Most cults in other Tamrielic cultures are focused on one specific Daedra, rather than acknowledging and worshiping them all in their turn. Daedra worship is definitely about a personal relationship and preference, rather than faith in the sense of belief in something that may or may not be the case.
That concludes our look at the main reasons to worship the Daedra. It’s not just something that’s done by bad people in TES, it’s something that is done for several reasons, and in different ways.
Next week, we’re looking at another Elder Scrolls text in-depth, looking at Father of the Niben, thanks to a suggestion from Songbird on the Written in Uncertainty Discord. that’ll be a podcast-only affair; the next write-up will be answering the question, what are souls in the Elder Scrolls universe?
Until then, this podcast remains a letter written in uncertainty.
