This week on Written in Uncertainty, I’m discussing a question that has consumed scholars in this world and in Mundus, one that gets down to the fundamental question of being. Today we’re asking, what is a soul in the Elder Scrolls universe?
As usual, I want to point out that this my own opinion on the soul in TES, and I may have either missed something, or be looking at things entirely the wrong way.
Souls & Power
At a basic level, in The Elder Scrolls at least, souls are the life-force, or life energy that fills living creatures. Energy is possibly the best word for how we encounter it in the games, as we get encouraged to engage in a form of soul magic by trapping souls in gems and then using them to power enchantments. Souls are frequently seen as batteries, and have been used as such on a large scale a few times in Tamriel’s history, which we’ll talk about a bit later.
If we see the souls as powerful, they have different levels of power. The soul gems used in most of the games are different sizes, from Petty to Lesser to Common to Great to Grand gem. These are formed from anima geodes, that seem to respond to the souls held within them. To quote from On Soul Shriven:
The differing qualities of these gems are mostly academic, consisting of odd protuberances or scintillating color patterns within the crystalline structure of the gem. However, one came across my table recently that was actively changing as I watched it over the course of several days.
Souls & Soul Energy
However, are these actually souls that are getting trapped here? Despite the name, it’s not really clear. There seems to be a distinct “soul energy” that is different from what we would think of as a “soul” that is the seat of personal identity or character. This gets distinguished most explicitly in the Unhallowed Legions Loremaster’s Archive, which makes exactly that distinction. It doesn’t help that “soul” and “soul energy” are mostly treated as the same thing in most places. I think that the clearest example we have of this is given in On Soul Shriven:
…in the confluence of events that followed foolish Varen’s bid for Divine investiture, it seemed that all souls taken from that moment forward went not to Soul Cairn, but to Molag Bal’s own clutches.
And thus, the first of the Soul Shriven were formed in Coldharbour — wretched creatures bereft of soul, an accretion of Oblivion-matter in the form of an echo of what the creature was in life. Interrogation and vivisection followed the arrival of this first Soul Shriven. Between wild spasms of hysteria, followed by deep states of ennui, the Soul Shriven expressed feelings of emptiness, hunger, and desire that no sustenance provided to them could fill…
…However, the Soul Shriven were not invulnerable; the eventual death of the Soul Shriven subject resulted in its complete annihilation, so utterly final that not even a trace of its essence could escape to Aetherius.
I would later learn that this complete destruction had another, unforeseen effect — a soul destroyed in such a manner empowered Molag Bal himself.
This shows us that there is energy in the sentience of a being, which normally goes to the Soul Cairn. This isn’t the same type of soul energy that gets put into typical soul gems, but another part of the soul altogether; part of the deal with black soul gems is that you get more soul energy in the gem, for sending this part of the soul, the bit that seems to have self-awareness, to the Ideal Masters or, in this case, to Molag Bal.
Parts of a Soul
While you can render down the sentient part of the soul into energy, it feels like a different type of thing than the pure energy that normally winds up in soul gems. There is a text that backs this up; the book Souls, Black and White states:
Centuries of experimentation has demonstrated that there are black souls and white souls. Only the rare black soul gem can hold the soul of a higher creature, such as a man or an elf.
This seems to imply different categories of soul, that have different parts. If you can have a large enough soul that can be split into two parts, one that only sapient, “higher” creatures have, that would make sense, right?
The Aristotelean Model
The Elder Scrolls possibly mirrors a model of the soul that we see from Aristotle. According to Aristotle, plants, animals and humans had different, almost cumulative types of soul. All three classes of life had a “nutritive” or “vegetative” soul, that allowed the entity to grow and change. To live, basically. Animals and humans then had a “sensitive” or “sensible” soul that gave them sense perception, the ability to perceive and react to things. Then humans alone had a “rational” or “reasoning” soul, that enabled them to think in the abstract about things they had experienced. It’s possible, given what we’ve looked at so far, that The Elder Scrolls has a similar model of the soul.
This fits really neatly, and I’ll come back to it a bit more later, but it may be, in its current form, a little too simple. Souls, Black and White first appears in the late Third Era, and we have a memo from Vanus Galerion on soul trapping that says that the black and white soul distinction is something that’s artificial, created by the Mages Guild:
Therefore I propose the Mages Guild codify and systematize the various soul-trapping magics into a common grimoire of a few reliable spells, and then teach our members that these, and only these, are the legal and authorized methods for trapping souls.
Furthermore, I propose that for the purposes of soul trapping we categorize all souls into two classes: the legal, or “White” souls, those smaller essences that are captured from beasts and animals, and illegal, or “Black” souls, which are derived from sentient mortals. And we will teach only those spells that can capture White souls, forbidding our students to use the larger soul gems on sentients.
This text states that the distinction is pretty much invented out of whole cloth by the Mages Guild to categorise those spells that wouldn’t be affected by the less powerful spells that would be taught, that there isn’t much difference beyond pure size. That suggests that there’s some sort of emergent property about souls, that over a certain size they develop more features, but those features aren’t really distinct parts of the whole.
Souls & Memories
There are quite a few places where we get the idea that souls contain memories, too. However, this doesn’t really jive with a popular idea in the lore community that memories become water. This is taken from a line in ESO where a character directly claims this, and the claim from the Anuad and Varieties of Faith that before the Ehlnofey Wars, in which lots of people died, there was no rain or oceans. If that’s the case, how do ghosts retain their memories? We also have the interesting case of the Argonians, which half backs this up and half doesn’t. The Argonians believe that they return to the Hist when they die, taking their memories with them. This quote from The Infernal City sums it up:
“It was generally believed that Argonians had been given their souls by the Hist, and when one died one’s soul returned to them, to be incarnated once more. [To Glim,] that seemed reasonable enough, at least under ordinary circumstances. In the deepest parts of his dreams or profound thinking were images, scents, tastes that the part of him that was sentient could not remember experiencing.”
There is the metaphor of trees drinking water to do this, which is where it matches. But the distinct portion of the Argonian soul that does this is left unclear. I think that it’s possible that the Hist are, essentially, functioning as an independent collection of souls, and are constantly pumping Argonian souls through the same circuits again and again, memories and all, which would result in this sort of effect.
There’s also a question about the Ancestor Moths, if memories disappear. To quote from The Distributed Soul:
The fjyrons themselves must retain a connection to the grand fabric of creation, to the scattered soul-remnants in all their destinations. Through this link and with patient care, we receive guidance from beyond the present or past and the known world, where time is irrelevant. The moths do not capture or devour the souls of the ancestors, but only repeat to us what they’ve filtered, like a chorus repeating the verses of a grand song.
The idea of “wisdom of the ancients” is a key thing with the Ancestor Moths, as well as their perspectives, which I talked about in the episode of this podcast about the Elder Scrolls themselves. If the moths impart guidance, they need to share lived experience, which is memory. Unless of course the wisdom gained by the moths is broadcast from outside creation, but I think that’s a little unlikely.
The Dreamsleeve
We hear about the Dreamsleeve very rarely, that several in the fandom have taken to be the place where souls go when people die. Either in the process of getting there or on arrival, they are stripped of memories and personality, becoming soul energy of a sort. This is then (probably) given to new souls as they are born; Mankar Camoran talks about the “dreaming-sleeve of birth” in the Commentaries on the Mysterium Xarxes. The Distributed Soul possibly helps us here:
Though it is typical to think of it as the Aedric essence at the core of every mortal, I advised him to consider the soul in another light, scaled like the wings of the moth, and to imagine it comprised of vessels filled through the events of mortal existence. On release from life on Nirn, it is our belief that a kind of dissipation begins, and it is then that the moths learn the song of a soul’s fjyrons, which are shepherded under our care and protected generation after generation.
That dissipation hints at the same sort of stripping away of memories that the Dreamsleeve is supposed to do. Perhaps, if we retain the water metaphor, memories “evaporate” from the soul proper, which then rejoin the “ocean” of the Dreamsleeve; if the mortal form and memory is a vessel of water, that is then poured into the ocean upon death. If you do that, the original water from the vessel is mingled with the ocean, and you can’t access them any more. That’s perhaps how we get memories that can persist in ghosts (that haven’t fully “evaporated” yet), memories becoming water (which is a representation of the Dreamsleeve), and then some memories returning to others. Perhaps memories only form part of the soul, which is why reincarnation and past lives aren’t a big thing in The Elder Scrolls. If we continue the water metaphor, if the souls of the dead contain both memory and non-memory soul energy, then memories would be only a part of the overall memory. If the Hist is recycling soul energy and memories over and over again, then the memories will be more “concentrated”, you’ll get more “parts-per-thousand” of memory in Argonians than in other races. Which would explain why those who are gathered to the Hist experience those fragmented memories more often.
The Dreamsleeve is also mentioned in An Elder Scrolls Legends: Battlespire as a place where souls can be stored and withdrawn again, as well as a means of communication. Fans tend to treat it like an email or Usenet type server. That’s certainly the way it appears in the Nu-Mantia Intercept, which is an unlicensed work by Michael Kirkbride presenting information on the Towers to the Elder Council. So what does that have to do with souls?
The way I read it, is that if memories and souls are fragmented in the Dreamsleeve, you can encode the information of a message through references to soul-fragments. The fragmented nature of the souls essentially forms an encryption layer to the transmission. Only if you have the means to pull them back together (which, I assume, is what the terminals are in Battlespire), can you read the message. You’re sending messages based on references to small portions of memory in the Dreamsleeve.
But are those memories the seat of your identity? It’s possible, but there is a model that goes around the community that suggests something different, and it centres on 2 letters. AE.
Souls & AE
What the devil is AE, I hear you all cry? Unless you know your Ehlnofex…
AE, or Æ, or however it’s pronounced, is the Ehlnofex word for “is”, like TAMRIEL AE DAEDROTH spoken by Mankar in TES IV: Oblivion. Or AYEM AE SEHTI AE VEHK in Sermon 1 of the 36 Lessons of Vivec. It may do double duty as “and”, which makes that line a bit more normal, but I prefer “is” there; it emphasises the trinitarian nature of the Tribunal, which gives them a bit more depth. But anyway, back to AE and souls!
AE, the expression of “is”, is seen as being similar to the notion of Ëa in Quenya, as well as containing the same letters. The Quenya ëa is “is” in the sense of “exists”. The notion of AE may play on a similar meaning. We have some comments in the Loveletter from the Fifth Era that seem to hint at this:
“Death results in reappropriation of spirit towards its aligned AE—either to the god-planet Aedra or the Principalities of Oblivion”
AE in this sense, spoken of earlier in the Loveletter as what the void was originally split into, seems to be the base “nature” of a soul, so to speak, the way in which a soul exists. There’s also the note that the Amaranth exists “beyond all AE”, so beyond existence and the fundamental duality that makes up the Elder Scrolls universe.
This seems to have an impact on the kind of energy a soul has. If we look at the text Chaotic Creatia: The Azure Plasm, we see that creatia is possibly Anuic or Padomaic in nature, and has a “valence”, which is an indicator of this. Maybe like a radio frequency? I don’t really know.
You’ll also see fans talk about AE as the seat of identity, the fundamental “I” of a person. Change the AE, and you change the person. There are indications, most notably Mankar Camoran, that you can alter your AE in this way, using specific forms of magic. But, despite its apparent connection to the afterlife and spirits in general, the AE is not the source of a mortal’s ability to use magic. Which is a bit weird if you think about how Atherius is the source of magic and where souls go.
I think this is down to a link in a soul’s animus, although this is purely my speculation at this point. But let’s unpack animus a second.
Souls & Animus
Animus gets mentioned in The Lunar Lorkhan as the counterpart to anima, and specifically the Daedra in the book Spirit of the Daedra. In that book, we have the line:
Destroy the Body, and the Animus is cast into The Darkness. But the Animus returns.
In Chaotic Creatia, there is also an Anuic animus mentioned, equating Anuic animus with soul as a whole. If we take Spirit of the Daedra at its word, this feels like the animus serves as the seat of identity for a Daedra, so are animus and AE the same thing? Spirit of the Daedra seems to treat them as the same thing, but remember that soul gems are taken from “animus geodes”. I don’t think they’d be associated with animus if they weren’t used for dealing with the animus. I’d suggest flipping it, that the AE is the more passive part. However, that goes against the idea that the souls of Daedra worshippers go to be with their lords, unless the “aligned AE” is a passive thing to be altered by the active part of the mind? That could work, but feels like a bit of a fudge to me. It’s also contrary to how most of the discussions on this topic go. If I’ve missed something with regards to AE, please let me know, either on the Written in Uncertainty Discord or by email.
Although they’re not the only things that can apparently alter a soul’s destination, whatever that may mean. We have several examples of ways to influence where a soul goes, from the idea that all werewolves to to Hircine, whether they want to or not, and the Dark Brotherhood claiming that the souls of those they kill go to Sithis. However, speaking about it a bit more generally, we have this quote from The Interpreted Soul Loremaster’s Archive:
It is the mortals themselves who decide the +destinations of their souls by the choices they make during life. However, that said, there have been reports that Worm Cult necromancers have devised a way of hijacking the souls of mortals sacrificed in a certain Daedric ritual.
This indicates that the soul will naturally go to their “aligned AE”, their own place, unless there’s something else acting on it. I’m not sure quite what that is, as, to use the Dark Brotherhood example, it’s not necessarily any form of magic being used on the soul itself. Unless the Black Sacrament is itself a ritual to do this? No idea.
We also have the Rites of Arkay, which are supposedly to stop a soul from being used against its will following death. Whether that’s against its will during life or its “current” will, I’m not sure. Both that does imply that there is some way to pull the “personhood” back from wherever it’s gone after death, and can be used to power things, which is what necromancers do. Again, we’re back at the person/energy split that we began this cast with, and some evidence against the idea that the soul is scattered upon death. Unless we assume that there is a separation between memory and non-memory, with most memory-based identity going to the “aligned AE”, and some other bits going along with the soul energy into the Dreamsleeve? That feels as close as I can get to an answer, but it doesn’t feel quite right.
The cynic in me says that this is probably because there’s been several different world design hands on The Elder Scrolls to shape the notion of what a soul is. Like the things themselves, the idea has probably been pulled in several directions, with the intriguing bundle of things that we’re left with. Souls are things that don’t fit into any particular space, and so we’re left with a ton of questions.
Thank you for joining me on this look through what souls are in The Elder Scrolls. Apologies this has taken longer than usual to work on, but there’s a ton of material to go through and I wanted to do it justice. I’ve barely touched on Dunmer attitudes to all this, or how subgradience plays a part, but I wanted to get this one out. I’ll have to come back and tie up a few loose ends here and there, which will be with you as soon as I can pull things together for this one.
Until next time, this podcast remains a letter written in uncertainty.
