Tamriel Data:On Purity
 On Purity |
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| ID | T_Bk_OnPurityTR | ||
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Purity, as we Altmer understand it, is often object to incoherent interpretation. Even some Altmer, particularly those of the lower castes, are not immune to it, as they eschew anything not manufactured or thought about on the Altmeri Isles as a symptom of inherent, contagious decay.
Purity in its original context would be best understood as Immaculate Degradation, that is a clear and uninterrupted line between our ancestors, our lesser ancestors, and ourselves, which allows us to stay detached from our prison in the mortal Mundus. In this context, impurity refers to races or beings who have stepped aside from the path of our ancestors and tied themselves with deeds, heritage, or magicka to the Mundus, Aetherius, or Oblivion.
The first thought spent by an Altmer when a given discussion turns to the topic of Purity are the Betmer, specifically the Goblins, Sload, and the Imga, if they are not wholely discarded as unrelated to common ancestral descent. Emphasizing abstract ends of the Betmer impurities, the Sload are beings of incomprehensible malice without understandable purpose. The Imga in turn are horrifying caricatures of beings wishing to partake in a traditional Aldmeri lifestyle, yet being unable to understand the difference between form and function, or that there is even such a difference in the first place. The Goblins meanwhile, little better than beasts, are seen as malleable students and soldiers, albeit at a marginal level.
Betmer as a whole are pitied, as they are incapable of grasping the whole they have lost. That some of them, most notably the Khajiit, sometimes take near-elven form is seen as one of Lorkhan's most abominable mockeries and does not fail to invoke revulsion in Altmeri scholars who have started to properly understand Purity and the Lunar Lattice.
The second thought would of course refer to the Septimian Empire, that is the assumption of rulership of Men over Mer while keeping the trappings of inherited Merish rulership. Men in general are derided, as their ancestors fell to and upheld Lorkhan's lie. When the Aldmer first encountered tribes of Men, they had been wholly changed into beings who accepted their degradation as purposeful, that is they reveled in mortal limitations and relished in their own suffering and death. What the Aldmer saw in themselves, they found as a grotesque caricatural opposite Other, from philosophical differences down to ancestor-defined feudal states facing incarnation-defined meritocratic tribes.
The different groups often blend into one another, and it is rare to encounter a proper Altmeri scholar who understands the subtle differences between the alien views of the Redguards, the Nibenese who see themselves as inheritors of the Ayleids, the Imga-like corruption of proper Aldmeri traits by the Bretons, or the Reachmen who would be more amenable to Merish rulership than that of the Septims.
The third thought, the splintering of the Aldmeri as a coherent definition, is more difficult to understand for Altmer. As is customary for someone wronged, there is always the assumed motive of malice instead of genuine disagreement or circumstances. In the proper, scholarly view, Merish splinters can be grouped into three distinct periods: Aedric and feudal corruptions, philosophical corruptions, and Daedric corruptions.
The earliest and most influential split was a feudal disagreement during or shortly after the evacuation of Aldmeris between the Aldmeri High Council and the war admiral Orgnum. It only became an Aedric split when he tied himself and his followers to the storms and serpents of the Pyandonean Isles. These particular concepts are so old that their names have been forgotten and their purpose invariably misunderstood, that is reinterpreted into Orgnum's eternal campaigns against the Altmeri Isles.
The fabled "Left-Handed Elves" are perhaps another splinter group that fled from Aldmeris while traversing a different path. They are incoherent in their heritage so it is unclear at this point if they were Aldmeri at all or merely a reinterpretation by the descendants of the Ra Gada, deciding during a time of open conflict between Men and Mer after arriving on Tamriel, that their historical enemies must have been akin to the enemies their neighbours were enamored by.
The Bosmer and Falmer, our most dear cousins, did not deliberately fall into Aedric corruption, and instead were forced into it. They set foot on the continent of Tamriel before its schismatic wholeness had sufficiently settled to be habitable and as such found themselves unsharpened, that is of unclear and shifting form. The Bosmer were forced to tie themselves to the walking folk of Valenwood as the Falmer tied themselves to the frozen memories of Skyrim.
It was only with the rise and fall of the Aldmeri Dominion that the Bosmer were recognized as almost-like-us in reason and thought. The subsequent conquest by the Septimian Empire only hastened the process, as surviving members of the Thalmor have gone into hiding and spread a narrative of unified Merish resistance against Imperial aggression into the ears of a new generation.
More difficult to understand conceptually are the philosophical corruptions. The Direnni may stand as a group of Aldmer who, while overly fond of numerological use of magicka, stayed and still are recognizably like us. Two other groups stand out as their opposite.
The Ayleids found themselves envious of Lorkhan's grotesque deed and threw themselves wholly into voluntary Daedric and Aetherial corruption in sincere imitation of the Great Lie, that is they assumed responsibility to finish the creation of a mortal world to their liking in miniature while liberally invoking Daedra and Magna-Ge for ascendancy and debauchery.
The Dwemer understood Immaculate Degradation to be an intellectually suffocating concept benefiting the Earthbones, that is they believed that by knowing too much about the Mundus the Aldmer could not properly misinterpret it, which prevented further learning. As an exclusive view it was seen as inherently destructive by Aldmeri society, and it is recognized as a fitting, if devastating, conclusion that the next time anything of the Dwemer set foot on the Isles occurred when the Anumidium destroyed millennia of our self-rule at the behest of Tiber Septim and a gift freely given by Vivec.
The last, and most devastating, impurity are Daedric corruptions, that is corruptions by those who are not involved in our ancestry and as such are immutably alien and unwanted in Altmeri affairs. Much has been written, often in too literal understanding, about the corruption of the Chimeri people. The assimilation of the incarnate Trinimac into the Daedric Boethiah, the exodus of the Velothian tribes, and the corruption of Trinimac's descendants into the Orsimer merely as afterproduct of Boethiah's eupepsy are well-known tales. It matters little that the Chimeri people later removed themselves from their Aldmeri progenitors a second time by choosing their own incarnate god un-ancestors to rule over them - a feat which some fear the Septimian Empire is trying to emulate with its emergent cults of the lineage of the hero-god Talos.
It is at this point however, where a proper discrimination between Aldmer and Altmer becomes possible due to an emergence of proper ancestral detachment, that is the Altmeri refused to tie themselves as close to their ancestral spirits as the Orsimer had done in fear of a similar feat being repeated. At this point, Immaculate Degradation became a reason for itself, and we Altmer became ourselves as the conclusion was redefined into one new, wholesome status, suitably detached from anything that might add or remove from it, immutable and pristine.
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