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So I was flipping through Words of Radiance and I noticed that the name of the spren that causes the death rattles is named Moelach. See Taravingian's POV chapter I-14 for more details. Mr. T describes Moelach in the Diagram thusly:

 

"There is one you will watch. Though all of them have some relevance to precognition, Moelach is one of the most powerful in this regard. His touch seeps into a soul as it breaks apart from the body, creating manifestations powered by the spark of death itself. But no, this is a distraction. Deviation. Kingship. We must discuss the nature of kingship."

 

-Epigraph Chapter 82, page 986 hardcover edition

 

According to the questions Brandon answered on Tor.com, he based some of the Roshar magic system on the Jewish mysticism of Kabbalah. 

 

With this connection in mind, I realized that the name 'Moelach' sounds an awful lot like "Moloch", a Mesopotamian god mentioned several times in the Old Testament with a negative connotation as a foreign and false god. Moloch is rather infamous because according to the biblical text, worshippers would sacrifice children to Moloch's flames.

 

But we're not done yet. In Mr. T's POV chapter, he brings up another evil spren named Nergaoul, who many readers think causes the Alethi Thrill:

 

"The Thrill is at least as strong here as it is in Alethkar. Maybe stronger. I will speak to our scholars. Perhaps this will help pinpoint Nergaoul."

 

-Chapter I-14, page 910 hardcover edition 

 

Well wouldn't you know it, but Nergal is also a Mesopotamian deity, also brought up in the bible. And Nergal is, among other things, a god of war.

 

I don't think any of this is a coincidence. Are there any other mentions of the names of super spren? 

 

Also worth noting is that "Moloch" in Hebrew uses the same letters (מלך) as the word for 'King'. Not sure how deep Brandon got into this, but it is a bit funny that Mr. T went from Moelach to Kingship in the Diagram.

 

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nergal

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moloch

http://www.tor.com/blogs/2014/06/brandon-sanderson-answers-your-questions-about-the-way-of-kings

Edited by israel8491
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You know, I wouldn't be surprised if the Moelach - Moloch - King thing is an Easter egg. And I also wouldn't be surprised if the other Unmade - assuming those two are, indeed, Unmade - can also be made to refer to Mesopotamian gods.

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Did a bit of research, and these names don't fit so neatly, so maybe this is a bit of a crack theory. But I did find some fun stuff.

 

Anyways, the best I could do with ReShephir is the Canaanite deity Resheph, the god of plague and war. Funnily enough, he came up in my Exodus class on Wednesday. However, in the death rattles ReShephir is called 'the Midnight Mother', and Resheph was a male god.

 

Dai-gonarthis is best linked with the Mesopotamian god Dagon, who is the god of fertility, grain, and fishing. Dai-gonarthis is called "the Black Fisher" in the death rattle quote from Way of Kings. Fish. Heh.

 

Sja-anat fits best with the Mesopotamian/Egyptian goddess Anat. Anat is a war-goddess and fairly badass.

 

Yelig-nar sounds like something out of a Lovecraft story. I couldn't find any connection.

 

So the big problem, besides finding no match for Yelig-nar, is that with this set of Unmade there are parts of the names that have no counterparts, such as the 'arthis' in Dai-gonarthis and the 'sja' in Sja-anat. Secondly, even if I am right and not making coincidental connections, is this anything more than a 'hey, cool' thing or is there any real significance?

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Yelig-nar sounds like something out of a Lovecraft story. I couldn't find any connection.

 

So the big problem, besides finding no match for Yelig-nar, is that with this set of Unmade there are parts of the names that have no counterparts, such as the 'arthis' in Dai-gonarthis and the 'sja' in Sja-anat. Secondly, even if I am right and not making coincidental connections, is this anything more than a 'hey, cool' thing or is there any real significance?

For the portions of words like "arthis" and "sja," I propose one of two things happened: Sanderson smooshed two names/gods together to form an Unmade, and so we need to find what Sja and arthis refer to, or he added those bits of the name to conceal the origin and make the names fit in with Roshar.

 

As for what we can do with this knowledge?  Well, how were these old gods defeated or dealt with?  That may give some clues to what can be done with/to them.

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What these all have in common is that these were all ancient gods from the Mesopotamian general area that popped up in biblical sources. Moloch gets quite a few mentions because of the child sacrifice thing. The temple that Samson brought down was Dagon's temple. These are also gods with either negative powers like death or war, or had negative qualities transposed on them. For example, Resheph actually was supposed to prevent illness. But in biblical references, he becomes the cause of disease.

 

As for how they were dealt with, the bible basically says that these gods don't exist and the Children of Israel should beware of them as false gods, or that they might have some power and should just be avoided in general.

 

Based on Brandon's interest and admitted influence of Kabbalah, it's quite possible that these names are all referenced in the Zohar (the big book of Kabbalah) as demons or something similar. However, the Zohar is long, weird, and really, really hard to understand (traditionally you're not supposed to even pick it up until you're 50 because if you're too young it'll blow your mind into little pieces). If anyone wants to dig through that, be my guest. I personally think Kabbalah is a bunch of entertaining nonsense, so I find it hard to take the Zohar seriously.

Edited by israel8491
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Tengrinism has some core believes that appear in SA (Tengri being the supreme God):

There exists many other spirits or 'angels' besides Tengri. These spirits are diverse. They can be good or bad or of mixed temperament... Under Tengri these spirits all have some limited influence, but it is near impossible for normal people to contact them. Only chosen people can contact them. Chosen people can also do the same thing these spirits do, like send destructive thunderstorms on enemy soldiers 

 

 

The spirits can harm people or act as agents in transmitting a message or prophecy about the future.

 

 

So here's the what I have on Yelig-nar also known as Blightwind:

  • Yer-sub are Tangrinism nature spirits that  
    could also participate in malevolent activity to harm humans, such as drowning humans, obstructing the harvest, or sucking the blood of livestock and sometimes humans.

     

  • Yel means wind in Turkish
  • Nar means fire in Maltese
  • Yel Ata is a Turkic god of wind, whose name translates into 'Fire Wind'

edit: adding the last one

Edited by Aleksiel
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The idea of spren originated from Korean (and not only) beliefs everything has a soul or a spirit. Tengrinism was a Central Asian religion, so there are bound to be similarities imo.  Brandon said he has influences from all over the place, so he had probably stumbled upon Tengrinism while researching variety of Asian mythologies. 

 

Yel Ata is a Turkic god of wind, whose name translates into 'Fire Wind'.

 

I'm not saying it's definitely that way, but I thought the similarities are worth mentioning and It works well for Blightwind. 

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Did a bit of research, and these names don't fit so neatly, so maybe this is a bit of a crack theory. But I did find some fun stuff.

 

Anyways, the best I could do with ReShephir is the Canaanite deity Resheph, the god of plague and war. Funnily enough, he came up in my Exodus class on Wednesday. However, in the death rattles ReShephir is called 'the Midnight Mother', and Resheph was a male god.

 

Dai-gonarthis is best linked with the Mesopotamian god Dagon, who is the god of fertility, grain, and fishing. Dai-gonarthis is called "the Black Fisher" in the death rattle quote from Way of Kings. Fish. Heh.

 

Sja-anat fits best with the Mesopotamian/Egyptian goddess Anat. Anat is a war-goddess and fairly badass.

 

Yelig-nar sounds like something out of a Lovecraft story. I couldn't find any connection.

 

So the big problem, besides finding no match for Yelig-nar, is that with this set of Unmade there are parts of the names that have no counterparts, such as the 'arthis' in Dai-gonarthis and the 'sja' in Sja-anat. Secondly, even if I am right and not making coincidental connections, is this anything more than a 'hey, cool' thing or is there any real significance?

All of the names appear to be somewhat altered, so I wouldn't worry about the -arthis. The Sja-, though, seems more like an indication that we have the wrong name.

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Sja-anat presents an interesting twist if my theory is true because the letter 'J' was not present in Semetic languages. Typically, Semetic words with the letter J, such as Jehovah, are transliterated from words that originally possessed a 'Y' (although in the case of Jehovah no one knows how to pronounce it which is kind of the point). Transliteration is really weird.

For Sja-anat, then, I've been looking for iterations with a 'Y' instead of the non-existent 'J', without much success.

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Sja-anat presents an interesting twist if my theory is true because the letter 'J' was not present in Semetic languages. Typically, Semetic words with the letter J, such as Jehovah, are transliterated from words that originally possessed a 'Y' (although in the case of Jehovah no one knows how to pronounce it which is kind of the point). Transliteration is really weird.

For Sja-anat, then, I've been looking for iterations with a 'Y' instead of the non-existent 'J', without much success.

We know that Jasnah's name is pronounced "Yasnah", so a y or i would probably be better. I've been doing some looking through the Wikipedia articles around ancient Mesopotamian religion and suchlike, but I haven't found anything close. The deities with names starting with "S" that I've found are Shalim, Shachar, Shamayim, Shemesh/Shamash, SennacheribSin (Shinu), and Semiramis. Of course, most of these were probably not mentioned in the Bible as "false gods", and so I would expect that they're less likely to be used for the names of Unmade.

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  • 1 year later...

A friend went to a book signing and asked Brandon Sanderson about this on my behalf. According to Sanderson, he does take name inspirations from a variety of sources, including mythology, but it has no significance to the plot. So we found a cool trivia fact.

 

Personally, I'm just happy that my idiot crack theory was right.

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  • 3 weeks later...

A friend went to a book signing and asked Brandon Sanderson about this on my behalf. According to Sanderson, he does take name inspirations from a variety of sources, including mythology, but it has no significance to the plot. So we found a cool trivia fact.

 

Personally, I'm just happy that my idiot crack theory was right.

 

Do you happen to know which signing your friend asked this at?  If so, would you mind posting about it in that event's thread in the Evens and Signings forum?

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I think that the Unmade/Odium Spren are already influencing the world and the people in it.  As an example I think Taravangian is actually being manipulated by Moelach.  Which is ironic considering Taravangian is how we know about Moelach in the first place.

 

"There is one you will watch. Though all of them have some relevance to precognition, Moelach is one of the most powerful in this regard. His touch seeps into a soul as it breaks apart from the body, creating manifestations powered by the spark of death itself. But no, this is a distraction. Deviation. Kingship. We must discuss the nature of kingship."

 

-Epigraph Chapter 82, page 986 hardcover edition

Setting up a basement where you drain the blood from people sure reeks of Taravangian's description of Moelach's influence.  The Diagram is a misguided (intentionally?) effort at precognition.  The diagram even hints that the nature of Taravangian's efforts is a "...distraction. Deviation."

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I think that the Unmade/Odium Spren are already influencing the world and the people in it.  As an example I think Taravangian is actually being manipulated by Moelach.  Which is ironic considering Taravangian is how we know about Moelach in the first place.

 

"There is one you will watch. Though all of them have some relevance to precognition, Moelach is one of the most powerful in this regard. His touch seeps into a soul as it breaks apart from the body, creating manifestations powered by the spark of death itself. But no, this is a distraction. Deviation. Kingship. We must discuss the nature of kingship."

 

-Epigraph Chapter 82, page 986 hardcover edition

Setting up a basement where you drain the blood from people sure reeks of Taravangian's description of Moelach's influence.  The Diagram is a misguided (intentionally?) effort at precognition.  The diagram even hints that the nature of Taravangian's efforts is a "...distraction. Deviation."

 

 

Which is even funnier, as there are some of us who think the Diagram contains a large amount of accurate information, but has been influenced subtly by one of the Unmade to have him help Odium in his plans.

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So, I looked through tWoK & WoR, I compiled all the "super spren" I could find and what they did:

  • Stormfather: Creator of highstorms, shard of Tanavast, father of Honorspren.
  • Nightwatcher: Gives humans one curse and one blessing, is somehow connected to Wyndle and those of his type of spren.
  • Moelach: Causes Death Rattles.
  • Sja-anat: Touches spren to turn them to spys.
  • ReShepher: I'm not certain.
  • Yelig-nar: Eats people's souls.
  • Dai-gonarthis: Not a clue.
  • Nergaoul: Causes the Thrill.
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So, I looked through tWoK & WoR, I compiled all the "super spren" I could find and what they did:

  • Nightwatcher: Gives humans one curse and one blessing, is somehow connected to Wyndle and those of his type of spren.

 

Is connected to Cultivation, not just Wyndle, I think.

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I think that the Unmade/Odium Spren are already influencing the world and the people in it.  As an example I think Taravangian is actually being manipulated by Moelach.  Which is ironic considering Taravangian is how we know about Moelach in the first place.

 

I've just finished WoR again and something I picked up that I hadn't noticed before was that when Kaladin was in prison "He stood, waving away some strange spren like taut wires crossing before him". My first thought were captivityspren, like Axies the collector was looking for in the first book, but the more I thought about that the less likely it seemed. Then I was wondering, could they have been spren of Odium working on him? It might go some way to explain how low he sunk so low so quickly while in prison.

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You know, I wouldn't be surprised if the Moelach - Moloch - King thing is an Easter egg. And I also wouldn't be surprised if the other Unmade - assuming those two are, indeed, Unmade - can also be made to refer to Mesopotamian gods.

If we're pointing out Easter eggs, Shinar is in the Old Testament, and is remarkably similar to Shinovar.

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