[OB]The city of Adonalsium

[Ripheus23]

Late in Oathbringer it is indicated that Urithiru was once alive. The Elantrians' powers depend on their city; the Dawncities correspond to cymatic patterns comparable to the patterns in Elantris; indeed cities are prominent locales in much of Sanderson's Cosmere storytelling. Ruin's body was made of metal. Besides words like "aluminium," the word "Adonalsium" is similar to architectural names like "coliseum" or "Palanaeum." So...

What if Adonalsium was a city? A living city, that is. Not God, then, so much as Zion. A city, that is, in the Spiritual Realm, exemplary of that Realm. Or, even, a city in all three Realms at once (hence Dalinar's quasi-apotheosis during the Battle of Thaylen City, for instance). The Shattering would have been the political division of that place, then.

(For those who are familiar with the Book of Revelation, and maybe Ezekiel (I don't know Ezekiel that well), the New Jerusalem/Heavenly City has 12 gates, correlated with 12 gemstones; so maybe the city of Adonalsium goes with 16 gemstones, instead.)

[Weltall]

We don't know exactly what Adonalsium was, whether a force, a being or perhaps a force that became sapient (which Investiture will do if left alone, and Adonalsium was the source of all the Investiture in the Cosmere) but we do know that Adonalsium was something capable of being murdered. Khriss and Nazh explain the Shattering in those terms and Brandon has said quite clearly that Adonlsium was Shattered because he was killed. You can't 'kill' a city. We also know that the sixteen Shards each represent not just a sixteenth of Adonalsium's power but an aspect of his personality.

It's a neat idea but I think it's a lot simpler to go with the Doylist explanation that Brandon just likes writing about cities for why they're so prominent in all his works, not just the Cosmere ones.

[Ripheus23]

IDK, why can't you kill a city? You can kill anything that's alive, after all. If there are sentient concepts (spren) in this universe, why not sentient cities?

EDIT: And the Shattering as a personality-splitting (among other things), that's a given, sure, but a political division is not a division of mere physical power. I'm thinking in terms of the political scientist Hannah Arendt's notion of politics, "the space of appearances" and such-like things (Google it if you like). A sixteen-fold personality could easily fit into a process of such a division.

Edited June 16, 2018 by Ripheus23

[Weltall]

Or perhaps you could give a capsule summary since it's your argument?

Okay, granting the idea of a city as a living thing, how does a city hate? How does a city have an independent will to bind things with oaths? How does a city have ambition? And why does everyone refer to Adonalsium as 'him' if it was a city? I know people anthropomorphize ships among other things but you don't hear people calling cities that way. Nazh in Secret History even says that the only real qualification the Vessels had to become gods was that they were "conniving enough to murder the guy who had the job before". If Adonalsium was a place, that would make no sense and Khriss would surely have mentioned something about it, if only as a rumor she'd heard.

Going to the whole New Jerusalem parallel, even there a distinction is drawn between the city that is the place of God on Earth and the God itself. Adonalsium may well have had some significant location on Yolen (we don't know nearly enough about the planet to say of course) but that doesn't mean that he was the location.

[Ripheus23]

Doesn't Veil go on for a little in OB about how cities have feelings or something? And I mean they specifically say Urithiru, a city, was alive.

My idea is that the Aon-patterns (and like forms) are equivalent to cymatic patterns, and that Adonalsium was some kind of unity of all those patterns, so that when the Shards/Splinters dispersed and "landed" in different places, they caused cymatic shockwaves e.g. on Roshar that laid the foundations for the Dawncities, or on Sel re: Elantris, and so on.

Now, all that being said, I don't deny that Adonalsium had a human-guy kind of form, too. We're told that Ruin had a physical body that basically consisted in a lake of atium-metal, but he could adopt a manly physique, if you will, too. And Odium has his human/parshman shape, and then that expanse of gilden flame.

On another level, "a force that became sapient (which Investiture will do if left alone, and Adonalsium was the source of all the Investiture in the Cosmere" is Sanderson-speak for LDS metaphysics of matter. The LDS Church doesn't say that matter itself was created from nothingness, but that divine creation is a special action on pre-existent substance (hence that fancy name for Tanavast, I don't recall it right now but the name that translates as "He Who Transforms"). Besides this basic "stuff," the cosmos also has a sort of automatic force-field of intelligence to it, and in "If You Could Hie to Kolob" (an LDS hymn) there's a section that goes,

"Do you think that you could ever, through all eternity,

Find out the generation where gods began to be?"

So, in LDS cosmology, there's a multiverse, and God as we know Him is "just" the God of this "sidereal heaven" (how one of the Prophets put it, IIRC). But He (Elohim) was a man, in a parallel universe, Who became exalted by following the ordinances of exaltation in that reality. (Whether He was redeemed man, with a Savior, is a different question; He might have been like Christ is in our universe, i.e. divine without having been recovered from sin first.) But as all time is "one eternal round," there is no privileged vantage, over all others, from which we can identify "where gods began to be" per se. So in the Cosmere, Adonalsium presumably achieved exaltation by following some peculiar process in His original reality, and the exaltation of the Shards proceeded according to a peculiar process in the secondary reality that He, Adonalsium, created (and His being killed, there and then, is something akin to how Christ, though a divine being, was able to be actually killed---in the LDS system, the Son didn't just die "in His human nature" but both natures, I think---in fact there's not so sharp a divide between human and divine essence, on those grounds). And now the Lord Ruler and Vin and Elend and Dalinar and so on and so forth are all achieving a tertiary exaltation, while Hoid/Cephandrius(?) is trying to "see the outside curtain, where nothing has a place," i.e. the point of the primary exaltation attained by Adonalsium.

Edited June 17, 2018 by Ripheus23

[Fatikis]

I don't understand any of this logic. 

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The Shattering would have been the political division of that place, then.

We know for a fact that it wasn't. The shattering is what created the shards. The shards aren't political divisions. 

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(For those who are familiar with the Book of Revelation, and maybe Ezekiel (I don't know Ezekiel that well), the New Jerusalem/Heavenly City has 12 gates, correlated with 12 gemstones; so maybe the city of Adonalsium goes with 16 gemstones, instead.)

What does that mean? How does this relate to Revelations?

The first jump in logic is that because cities are important that Adonalsium is a city. You offer no logical reasoning for this.
The second is that The Shattering involved political divisions of this city. Something we know to be false.
Next you've include gemstones and Revelations in for a reason that I cannot even begin to guess at.

It is an interesting idea, but I think we can say with very near certainty that Adonalsium was not a city.

Or at the very least there is currently no logical reason to suspect Adonalsium of being a city.

Edited June 17, 2018 by Fatikis

[Weltall]

3 hours ago, Ripheus23 said:

Doesn't Veil go on for a little in OB about how cities have feelings or something? And I mean they specifically say Urithiru, a city, was alive.

She may liken a city to a living thing but that's not the same as a city being a living thing. Urithiru was not an independently living city, it was a city that 'lived' when it was powered by a big honking whack of sapient Investiture called the Sibling. In other words, an entity separate from the city which existed before it was created and which continues to exist in some form independent of Urithiru.

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My idea is that the Aon-patterns (and like forms) are equivalent to cymatic patterns, and that Adonalsium was some kind of unity of all those patterns, so that when the Shards/Splinters dispersed and "landed" in different places, they caused cymatic shockwaves e.g. on Roshar that laid the foundations for the Dawncities, or on Sel re: Elantris, and so on.

The Shards did not 'land' anywhere per se, they traveled to their current locations independently. Roshar was created directly by Adonalsium which is why the supercontinent looks the way it does. Given what Oathbringer revealed, it's likely that any Dawncities also predated the arrival of the Shards. The idea that Adonalsium was a sort of super-pattern and all the Shards are lesser examples stops making a lot of sense when you broaden your scope to those worlds that do not have form-based magic or anything resembling Roshar and its love for symmetry. Nalthis doesn't have anything similar, Scadrial doesn't have anything similar and if Taldain or Threnody does, we haven't seen any evidence of it yet.

Brandon has also said that Selish magic doesn't interact well with other worlds in the context of whether you could make something similar to Aons based on cymatics, though it's not obvious whether he was just thinking of the usual problem of Selish Investiture's range limitation or if he was broadening it to other applications. But if he was thinking of the latter, it would be a point against your super-pattern theory.

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So in the Cosmere, Adonalsium presumably achieved exaltation by following some peculiar process in His original reality, and the exaltation of the Shards proceeded according to a peculiar process in the secondary reality that He, Adonalsium, created (and His being killed, there and then, is something akin to how Christ, though a divine being, was able to be actually killed---in the LDS system, the Son didn't just die "in His human nature" but both natures, I think---in fact there's not so sharp a divide between human and divine essence, on those grounds).

Brandon uses all sorts of other metaphysical constructs in his writing. There's a lot of Shinto in the nature of the spren on Roshar for example, and Sel has a lot of dualist elements derived from Chinese metaphysics, the idea of the God Beyond is explicity drawn from Gnosticism and so on. While this is an interesting look at LDS metaphysics and we know that Brandon weaves some of that into his writing, I'm not entirely sure how or why you think this supports your idea that Adonalsium was a city.

[Ripheus23]

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The second is that The Shattering involved political divisions of this city. Something we know to be false.

I'm not talking politics in the... average sense? I'm talking a highly metaphysical sense of the subject. Now the fact that one of the Shards is known as "Autonomy" is an indication along the lines of what I mean. (I know, multiple meanings to that word, but...)

17 hours ago, Weltall said:

Urithiru was not an independently living city, it was a city that 'lived' when it was powered by a big honking whack of sapient Investiture called the Sibling. In other words, an entity separate from the city which existed before it was created and which continues to exist in some form independent of Urithiru.

I had no knowledge of this, I don't know what the Sibling is, etc.

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The idea that Adonalsium was a sort of super-pattern and all the Shards are lesser examples stops making a lot of sense when you broaden your scope to those worlds that do not have form-based magic or anything resembling Roshar and its love for symmetry.

I don't mean to imply that the only magic derived from Adonalsium/the Shards is ultimately Aon-like/cymatic in appearance/style/whatever, but that there's an importance to the similarity, and to the unity we imagine Adonalsium exhibited.

17 hours ago, Weltall said:

While this is an interesting look at LDS metaphysics and we know that Brandon weaves some of that into his writing, I'm not entirely sure how or why you think this supports your idea that Adonalsium was a city.

I guess I just meant, also as an advance reply to...

19 hours ago, Fatikis said:

Next you've include gemstones and Revelations in for a reason that I cannot even begin to guess at.

... that Sanderson's LDS background would be a source, for him, for an image of a divine city, a being sort of similar to God. That is, there is no temple in Zion because the Father and the Son are Themselves the temple (and some people say the Spirit is "the River of the Waters of Life" that flows from the Father and Son), and Zion is the place of God's Name, and God is His own Name, and so on and on---that is, Zion, in Christianity, is not just some location corollary to God, but part of God being Incarnate (or so it seems to me).

So maybe it's not so much that Adonalsium was a "city" but a "temple"?

I think (from my reading of the Book of Mormon) that the New Jerusalem is, according to the LDS Church, supposed to be a city in the Western Hemisphere, so who knows, though.