From Lorkhan to Lenin. On the (im)possibility of secularizing the sacred (or sacralizing the secular)
In the lore of The Elder Scrolls, “mantling” is the process by which someone takes on the role—or the metaphysical office—of another being (usually a god or archetypal figure) by repeating their gestures, their actions, their fate, their position, until they become them (until the world no longer distinguishes between the two). “Walk like them until they must walk like you.”1 It’s a mythical form of succession: to become a god, one must embody it.
Talos is the paradigmatic case of successful mantling. His apotheosis was the culmination of a series of founding gestures—conquest, unification, the establishment of a new era. His figure merges multiple identities (Hjalti Early-Beard, Tiber Septim, and Zurin Arctus) and becomes more than a man; he embodied the Lorkhanic myth,2 and thus became real.
The Tribunal, by contrast, represents a failed mantling. In The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, Vivec, Almalexia, and Sotha Sil reach divinity by stealing power from the Heart of Lorkhan. They become living gods to their people—but their divinity is artificial, and eventually fades. Their mantling is unstable. It fails due to a lack of ontological legitimacy. It rests on technology, not numen. When, in the game, we destroy the Heart, the masquerade collapses with it. Talos is the embodiment of myth; the Tribunal, the instrumentalization of power.
Something similar can be seen in the Soviet twilight. The Party tried to take the place of religion, mimicking its forms, dressing itself in the sacred. But that mantling failed as well. It did not embody. And with the collapse, the truly sacred reclaimed its place.
As Carl Schmitt wrote, all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts3. The Party sought to assume that role, but lacked genuine sacrality. Like the Tribunal of Morrowind, it replicated the forms but failed to embody the myth. When its political theology collapsed, all that remained was an empty altar—and the persistent shadow of the transcendent. For the desire for the sacred never truly disappears; it retreats, or transforms. Or waits, among ruins, for one who walks like the gods until the world mistakes them for one.
— E.
In Nu-Hatta of the Sphinxmoth Inquiry Tree (ca. 2005), by Michael Kirkbride, available here.↩
The Lorkhanic myth tells the story of the conflict between Lorkhan—who convinces the spirits (et’Ada) to create the world, thereby condemning them to mortality—and Akatosh, symbol of eternal order. Lorkhan is both the engine of existence and a tragic figure: in some versions, a traitor who deceives the gods; in others, a sacrificial martyr who offers himself to make creation possible. In some accounts he is defeated by Trinimac, in others punished by Akatosh, but in all, his heart is torn out and cast into the world, where it remains as a sacred relic of a creative will that cannot be erased.↩
In Political Theology (1922; The University of Chicago Press, 2005).↩