Adonalsium and the God beyond

[Stark]

Hi all.  Have a nice short idea for everyone to take apart.  Please do not be gentle with it, show me the flaws!

 

What we know:

1) There was a being named Adonalsium, presumably male form in world discussion.  He died, was killed - his power split into 16 parts, divided among those who killed him.  

2) The Cosmere borrows heavily from Earth religions for imagery, but does tend to have a heavy dose of imagery and symbolism from the Mormon sect of Christianity.  I do not know enough about this subset to comment further - but I have read some of the commentary from practioners in this forum that do point out some of the imagery.

What we theorize:

1) There is a God beyond Adonalsium.  Mostly unknown to all, but there have been hints, and possibly some Cosmere scholars theorizing along the same lines.

 

My thought:  What if Adonalsium and the God beyond have a Jesus - God relationship?  What if Adonalsium is the son of the God beyond sent into the Cosmere to experience it on behalf of the God beyond?  Who was then slain by the inhabitants of the Cosmere?  And, if you subscribe to the Iriali being more cosmically aware, and right, that Adonalsium is destined to return?

 

What if Adonalsium, who clearly could die, and therefore by Jasnah's argument is not truly a god, because gods cannot die, but the son of god?  Only instead of returning three days post shattering, he is due to return thousands of years later after his power has experienced the universe fully on behalf of the God Beyond?  And if this parallel is valid, would there then not be an equivalent to the spear still hidden somewhere in the Cosmere?

 

I have no proof - just a thought that came to me, that I had to write down to see if others agreed, or had thoughts along similar pathways.  I'd especially love to hear from those who belong to the Church of LDS could weigh in on the teachings about Jesus and God - is he purely the son of god, or is he god giving himself mortal form to experience his own creation?  The views on his resurrection?  And how all this could tie into the Cosmere in a situation were the disconnect between man and god was so great that he was only a faint hint of a presence and most of the universe was unaware of his sons existence, but had knowledge of his power?

[Calderis]

I don't think there is a relationship between Adonalsium and the God Beyond. If there is, we'll never know of it. The God Beyond, and the afterlife that is the Beyond, is something that Brandon is not ever going to directly address in the books. 

Quote

Questioner [PENDING REVIEW]

After people die, in this universe, where do they go? Because, at first they appear in the <?>, and then they go somewhere else.

Brandon Sanderson [PENDING REVIEW]

One of the things that's very important to me as a writer, when I am writing stories, is when we get to these kind of fundamental questions about faith and religion and things like this, that the narrative is allowing multiple characters' viewpoints to be plausibly true, if this makes sense. For instance, I am not gonna come out and say, "Is there a capital-G God of the cosmere, is there an afterlife?" These are not questions I'm gonna answer, because in-world, they can't answer them. What they can say is, your Investiture will leave what we call a Cognitive Shadow, which is an imprint of your personality that can do certain things. And that most of those fade away, and you can see them, glimpse them, and then watch them go. But, are they going somewhere? Or are they not? Is that simply the Investiture being reclaimed, Is it more of a Buddhist thought, where your soul is getting recycled and used again? Is it nothing, you return to, you know, being... yeah, is it a different type of matter? Or is there a Beyond, is there a capital-G God? These questions are not answered. I'm never gonna answer those.

Now, the characters will try to answer them. But it's important to me that both Dalinar and Jasnah can exist in the same universe, and that the story is not saying "This one is right, and this one is wrong." The story is saying "This is how this one sees the world; this is how this one sees the world." It's very important to me from the beginning to do that, just because... Like, I hate reading a book where someone espouses my viewpoint only to get proven wrong by the entire structure of the narrative, and in that universe, that person is wrong. But I'm like, "In our universe, I don't think that I am. Just the way you constructed everything makes it so that I have to be wrong, if I were living in your universe, even if it's not a sci-fi/fantasy one." If that makes sense.

This is just kind of for respecting my characters and for the people who hold the viewpoints of my characters, in particular if they happen to be different from my own viewpoints. I feel there are certain lines I'm not gonna cross.

So, the answer is: who do you believe? Which of the philosophies in the books do you look at and say "Yeah!" Or, even better: listen to lots of different ones, and maybe these different viewpoints are all gonna have interesting points that'll things to think upon.

source

 

[Weltall]

3 hours ago, Stark said:

My thought:  What if Adonalsium and the God beyond have a Jesus - God relationship?  What if Adonalsium is the son of the God beyond sent into the Cosmere to experience it on behalf of the God beyond?  Who was then slain by the inhabitants of the Cosmere?  And, if you subscribe to the Iriali being more cosmically aware, and right, that Adonalsium is destined to return?

Like Calderis said, this is a question we're never going to get an official answer to. The closest we're likely to come is that Brandon has said there are some parallels between the God Beyond and some Gnostic beliefs and that Adonalsium could be mapped reasonably well to the idea of the demiurge. However, there's enough qualifiers there that we can't actually nail down what is the reality for the Cosmere from what might be the reality. For example, Brandon says that the idea of the God Beyond has Gnostic parallels, which doesn't actually tell us that the God Beyond exists or has any particular relationship to anything, just that the belief is similar. Likewise, the demiurge parallels with Adonalsium don't necessarily mean that there's a higher force beyond Adonalsium, just that he may not necessarily have created everything, without reference to what (if anything) 'created' the wider universe. You could of course interpret the statements the other way, but they're vague enough to go either direction.

That said, I am on board with the idea that the Iriali are more Cosmere-aware (even if they don't remember the specifics any longer) and I kind of like the idea that Ym's story of the One is their explanation for why the Shattering happened. It's got some neat resonance with various strains of theology (particularly some schools of thought in Judaism) that God created the universe in order to understand Himself.