The Hist Reexamined | Tamriel Rebuilt
About
Read on Omnivore
Read Original
This page is powered by Omnivore ‐ you can read more about how I use Omnivore here: Omnivore - Saving Articles for Citations in Obsidian.
Highlights
The Hist are vast soul repositories, self-contained Towers of their previous reality, containg oceans of sap memories. There is no governing intellect at work, they are simply too big and their real mind moves at molasses. ⤴️
The nature of The Hist from a TR/PT lore perspective.
Some unlucky(?) not-yet lizards licked the sap and by the sheer weight of the souls they absorped were forced into sapience by the rules of the new reality.
Bleeding off their own soul mass into animals was how the Hist were able of sustaining themselves. Since they were realized as a vast forest, the souls that died in their swampy realm returned to themselves instead of going to the new reality‘s Dreamsleeve. ⤴️
A note on 'reincarnation' amongst Argonians – souls that die in Argonia return to the Hist, instead of the Dreamsleeve. What about Argonians who die away from Black Marsh?
Hist Offspring
First are the Argonians, who consider themselves „People of the Root“ and worship the Hist alternatively as their creators, their ancestors, or as themselves.
The Argonians are the most direct descendants of the Hist, with no other sapience inbetween. Although a cultural tradition, ingesting Hist sap ties young Argonians to their Hist, they receive additional soul mass, instincts, vague, fleeting memories. Argonians who never ingested Hist sap may retain some of the instincts their parents had, but they are no longer Hist-descended and thereby defective in some way, although they might feel less lacking and more unburdened (liberated?) by the lack of additional soul mass. It is possible for them to align them to the Hist later in life, with no complications. ⤴️
Argonian 'reincarnation' is perhaps less a matter of dying and being born again as another Argonian, than it is their vague memories and instincts being absorbed by the Hist upon death and collectively passed on to new generations; collectivism, not individualism.
Since they usually conduct this ritual when looking for answers and the Hist are not capable of thinking, they can only find means but not ends. The Kothringi were extinguished by a shaman‘s malice, not a Hist master plan. The Argonians might not be „free“ like the other races are, but they are still masters of their own decisions. ⤴️
Freewill and Argonians