Let me begin by saying that I’ve only ever read the first book of The Wheel of Time series, and quite some time ago. I found it too much a rehashing of The Fellowship of the Rings to move me much, so I never progressed to the later books. I suspect I’ve missed out, as the series seems to come into its own as it continues. Nevertheless, for the sake of transparency, the knowledge that is the basis of this post is mostly limited to the television series (what gave rise to the ideas here) and my review of wiki information specifically about the Wheel and the cosmology it represents. If I mistate the facts, or leave out some critical piece of information, I hope that someone will let me know and I can revise appropriately.

I’ll also remark that I had difficulty determining where to place this post on the blog–whether it should be in “theology” or “worldbuilding,” because both topics overlap and meet here. I hedged my bets and put it in both categories.

That said, I find the Wheel within the series (at least as I understand it) to be a pessimistic and depressing cosmic structure.

One final note before we dig in: the Wheel of Time uses the analogy of a “loom” for the eponymous Wheel as it weaves a Pattern of events and existence. If I understand correctly, that’s a mistaken metaphor–a spinning wheel is not a loom, being used to create thread or yarn from multiple strands, and I’m not aware of any looms that use a wheel structure, since a loom is intended to create fabric by weaving vertical and horizontal strings together.

Time, Eternity, Immortality and the Wheel

As described, the Wheel eternally rotates in a form of cyclical time, with mortal spirits being reincarnated once they die into new persons without a memory of their past live(s). Neither a cyclical view of time nor the idea of metempsychosis are original to Jordan. Indeed, he was clear that he was borrowing from world mythologies and religions (mentioning Hinduism in particular). But the way that Jordan implements these ideas in his world are, I believe problematic. That is not to say wrong; he can build a world with whatever cosmology and ultimate reality he likes and it’s not for anyone else to say he’s chosen incorrectly. Instead, I’ll only argue my position that the choices he’s made end up with a depressing–dare I say hopeless–result. As you all know, I’m a fan of the Warhammer Fantasy and 40k universe(s) (though not without serious criticisms), and the view of the cosmos in that setting is about as bleak as can be.

So, again, there’s no reason any worldbuilder cannot choose a bleak cosmic structure. If your genre is “grimdark” (whatever that actually means) or existential horror, or if your themes are nihilistic–or about heroic defiance in the face of a nihilistic reality, for that matter–such cosmologies might be appropriate, even advised. Certainly, Lovecraft made great use of such a grim view of an uncaring universe. The problem then, is when you create a cosmic structure for your world that you intend to be “good” but that, when viewed as a totality, is not. I think that’s where Jordan ended up, and I have the feeling that, in a series about the cosmic struggle between good and evil, that’s not really what he intended.

Here’s the argument in detail. Any form of eternal life, persistance of the spirit, afterlife, what have you, must have some foundational stability and consistency to be classifiable as “good.” If you are born over and over without ever remembering your past lives (your past “selves”), there’s as good an argument as not that you’re not really the same person that died before being “reincarnated.” I think of the Buddhist saying that “you can never step in the same river twice.” The idea is that change is the only constant and there is no continuity of self; that is only an illusion. With this in mind, we might just as equally say that the person who died and the person who is reborn are not, in fact, the same person. Some part of the soul may be eternal, but personhood is not.

This raises a common theological question/problem in the idea of immortality of the soul. When we talk about eternal life, an afterlife, immortality or even reincarnation, we need to be more specific. Do we mean an experientially-continuous existence beyond death (what I’ll call, revealing my bias, a “real immortality”) or one in which the continuity is in some part of the soul other than the person and consciousness, the self (I’ll call this “metaphoric immortality”)?

This post is not intended to resolve that question. I have my beliefs and my arguments, but no human is capable of proving the reality of one possibility over the other. Instead, I want to look at the consequences of those possibilities.

Fundamental to this discussion is the often-avoided question of what a “soul” is. Are consciousness, introspection, experience, personality and personhood synonymous with the soul, or not? Various religions have answered the question in different ways.

The ancient Egyptians believed the soul to be made up of many parts. The khet or physical body, was a necessary part of the soul and of the experience of an afterlife, hence the practice of preservation of remains and mummification. But there is also a sah or spiritual body, which is the body used by a person to directly interact with the afterlife. There was also the ren, indicating the identity of the person. Like the body, preservation of the ren was necessary to the continued existence of a person after death. This made the remembrance of names central, as well as giving rise to the practice of defacing names inscribed on funerary items to hinder an enemy in their afterlife. It’s important to note, I think, that the khet and sah both have aspects external to the person but nevertheless affecting the “condition” of the soul. In Western thought, I think we tend to assume, rightly or wrongly, that all conditions necessary to the existence of the soul come either from within the soul itself or from God, but that the state of a soul is not contingent upon external factors within the living world. But let us return to the Egyptians.

There is also the ka, the vital source that, when dwelling within a corporeal body, makes that body alive and that leaves the body at death. Perhaps curiously, the idea was that one of the Egyptian gods breathed into a body at the instant of birth to give them ka and life, similar to the idea of the Judeo-Christian God breathing spirit into Adam in Genesis. All of the previous aspects of soul are accompanied by the ba, the “personality” or uniqueness of the person. I gather that the understanding of the ba is nuanced and complex, with views of the ba joining the ka to experience the afterlife and beliefs about the ba having a sort of spiritual form that is the being to which votive offerings are made–the ba absorbs not the offerings themselves (the food and drink) but the ba of those items. Some scholars argue that the Egyptians really had no concept of the un-incarnated or immaterial soul, perhaps further distancing Egyptian thought from the Western (read “Greco-Roman”) idea of the soul as “being” itself. Even with the personality of the person being defined by the ba, there is also the akh or intellect of the person as an entity. Suffice to say that I am no Egyptologist, much less an expert in Egyptian religion, but that the ancient Egyptian religion represents a very different view–at least potentially–from Western thought. I wonder, but do not know (and think that it is most likely that this is a misguided attempt to Westernize Egyptian thought), whether there is some belief in this system in the unity or consubstantiality of the aspects of the soul in a sort of Trinitarian sense, where there are individual soul parts, but they form a single person, with the aspects being bound together in some inseparable way.

All of this is to raise the question of how the subjective experience and “personhood” is related to the soul and to provide an example that they need not be thought of as so. This is how a “metaphorical” immortality is possible to conceive: there is a part of the soul that is eternal, but it is not the subjective personhood. This seems to be where Jordan’s concept of the Wheel ends up, but there are alternatives.

Those alternatives might include Hinduism and Buddhism. In Hinduism, the ultimate goal is to escape the cycle of reincarnation and to return to unity with the divine. The Hindu faith an pantheistic, seeing all things as God. In such a case, one can argue that there was never a “person” to begin with, only a manifestation of God seemingly and temporarily separate from the divine unity. Here, then, the entire experience of the individual is (arguably) illusory. Likewise in some forms of Buddhism, where, as mentioned above, the idea of self at all is likewise viewed as illusory, with an utlimate goal, similar to Hinduism, to escape the cycle of reincarnation to experience nirvana, which may or may not be a subjective experience of the unity of all things. Pure Land Buddhism does include belief in a subjective eternal life; one must be careful not to describe Buddhism (or any religion for that matter) as monolithic–there will always be some variation in specific doctrines, dogmas, theology, practice and belief.

For me, the lack of the independent existence of the individual leads to a lack of meaning. And likewise, I consider it a misnomer to call anything that does not include the continuity of subjective experience of individuality and active agency “eternal life” or “immortality.” I do want to be careful here to state that I do not belive that religions like Hinduism and Buddhism are themselves meaningless–these faiths have given comfort to many, made many better people than they might otherwise be, and have supported many experiences of the divine. Therefore, while their concepts of the ultimate fate of individuals may disturb me, personally, I cannot, and will not, discount them as invalid forms of belief or think of their believers as “less than.” My God is bigger than any one religion and I think there are valuable things revealed about the nature of God in other religions, even if I believe that Christianity (with the caveat of being properly understood, which precludes conservative and fundamentalist interpretations of the faith) offers the clearest, best, and most hopeful of all possible ultimate realities.

Apart from that (significant) caveat, I’d also like to state that there are some theologies within Christianity that deny a subjective, experiential. eternal life and confirm only a metaphoric immortality in the “memory of God.” These theologies often lean toward pantheism as well. I just want to be clear here that this isn’t an argument necessarily between Western and Eastern religions–it’s an argument of theologies within any religion.

To return more closely to the topic at hand, let’s look at the idea of reincarnation without continuity of memory. Here, I’d create two categories. The first is which reincarnation without continuity of memory is only a step along the path, with an ultimate fate of being made whole in mind and memory in an eternal existence after that point. Here, the ultimate consolidation of self means that, while memories were “locked away” for a time (as we often expereince within a single life as memories fade from direct consciousness only to be unexpectedly revived by a smell, or person, or place), they are not, ultimately, lost. This allows for, in the eternal sense, continuity of self.

The second category is where previous lives would will never be remembered. Without any contiuity of memory ever, we have the Theseus’ Ship problem–when does new experience (or the forgetting of old experience) change a person so thoroughly that it would not be truthful to consider the person in a current incarnation the “same person” as the same “soul” in a previous incarnation. This is the same problem I’ve mentioned with the idea of consciousness uploading in other posts–it might be fairer to say that reincarnation in such a state is really death by another name (hence “metaphoric reality”). The Rand al’Thor of the novels is not really the same person as the Dragon in the previous age, they’re just similar versions of an archetype, different material manifestations of one of Plato’s perfect Forms. I would argue that memory is a fundamental aspect of personhood–this is why dementia and Alzheimer’s are so feared, and rightly so.

To be fair, the TV show makes some allusion to the idea that people occasionally remember bits and pieces about their past lives–Ishamael remarks frequently about the past encounters between him and Rand. I don’t know whether this is accurate to the book series. Some individuals, mostly the Forsaken, do seem to have continuous consciousness regardless of the spinning of the Wheel. Again, whether this is a mistake in transalating the books to TV, an internal consistency problem, or a nuance of the cosmology I cannot say.

Even so, I’ve seen no indication that, ro most people, there will be an ultimate resolution in existence where the Wheel stops turning and individuals are able to experience an eternal, subjective immortality with the people who they love. The series leaves me with the idea that the Wheel represents an eternity of brief reunions with beloved ones punctuated by long absences. In addition to the problem for the individual in such a continuity, for the Wheel to keep turning eternally means there is no ultimate resolution in the problems of evil, suffering, and justice. One could argue for a cosmology that preserves balance in all things rather than one that seeks ultimate good, but I’d argue that any cosmology that does not seek the ultimate good isn’t actually good (and, for the record, that includes versions of Christianity that believe in inescapable eternal punishment as a potential afterlife). Of course, there could be an ultimate resolution to the Wheel that takes place upon the final defeat of the Dark One that would potentially obviate all of the above. If there is, someone let me know!

I think that this ultimately demonstrates an important aspect of any belief in the immortality of the soul (here, by soul, I mean “person” the essential being that has subjective consciousness). Specifically, immortality is necessary, but not sufficient, to a “good” afterlife. The inability to die isn’t necessarily good if the result is immortality in a broken, fallen world means an eternity of depression, nihilism, suffering and ennuie. My understanding of Ishamael’s character (at least in the TV show) is that eternal ennuie is the reason he wants to stop the Wheel (and destroy all of Creation) in the first place. My understanding of the Wheel seems to indicate that Ishamael might be right–but that, itself, can’t be right, can it?

Where is God?

I’m told that, in the style of the watchmaker god, the Creator in the Wheel of Time world created the Wheel and the Pattern but then just kind of stands back and lets everything unfold as it will, uncaring and aloof from all created things. Now, one can argue that the existence of the Dragon and ta’veren (which we’ll get to momentarily) represents a pre-ordained intervention of the Creator in Creation, I have not seen any indication that any character in the series ever, Job-like, questions why the Creator has allowed things to be this way, with an immensely powerful individual representing evil personified and a contingent, not entirely reliable, champion representing the power of Good (the problem of Men and the use of the Power itself is the readiest indication of this).

As I mentioned at the outset, it seems that Tolkien was a major influence on Jordan. Yet, Jordan seems to have ignored what makes Tolkien’s treatment of the divine in his world so potent. For one, the divine is active in Middle-Earth, even if in subtle ways. The existence of Tom Bombadil, the ultimately angelic nature of Gandalf, and many other things deep within the legendarium make this clear. At the same time, Tolkien is relatively explicit that the God of Middle-Earth (Eru Iluvatar, as the God is called) intentionally allows mortals to be instruments of good within the world (Tolkien might say that this is part and parcel with his ideas of “co-creation”). Again, admittedly, Tolkien has a profoundly Christian worldview influencing his creation of Middle-Earth and its cosmology, which biases me.

But I think that it nevertheless raises a fair point: if your setting is going to deal with problems of good and evil writ large, or if religion will be a significant part of your setting, characters or plots, you can’t just pick and choose parts of world religions and mythologies and mash them together without taking the time to fit the pieces into a congruous and believable whole.

There is, of course, the option of writing fantasy that does not deal with religion and cosmology, and if that’s not your focus, no one should make you deal with it. On the other hand, one of the ways in which fantasy fiction can be “high art” is the way in which it allows us to probe existential questions. Where a setting vastly different from the world we live in nevertheless reveals truths about experience and existence common to both the fiction and the real, we’ve unveiled some sort of cosmic truth, however small that truth may be. This, I think, may have been a large part of Tolkien’s point.

The Pattern and the Ta’varen

The relationship between the Wheel and free will is not clearly defined. While it might have been too heavy-handed to devle into the details of that relationship, its one thing when a fantasy setting contains a religious system whose relationship to absolute truth is ambiguous. No definitive answers may be possible with such ideologies, nor may they be desireable. On the other hand, when you have an explicit ultimate truth, like the one represented by the Wheel, it becomes harder not to address those issues and have that cosmology be believable.

So, we are left wondering whether the Wheel’s Pattern represents predestination. I think there’s strong indications that it does (and this is a problem to address with any use of “prophecy,” whether in this world’s theology or that of a constructed setting), but such predestination robs the story of much of its import; it deprives the characters’ “choices” of depth and meaning.

This is further complicated by the existence of “ta’veren.” The wiki-based information about the Wheel of Time indicates that “ta’veren” are those people who are especially important to the “Web of Destiny” weaved by the Wheel and that they are used to “correct” things when events are straying from the “Pattern.” Not only does this push us toward the predestination view of the Wheel, but it also forces us into less chauvinist version of the “Great Man Theory of History,” but one that nevertheless privileges the role of the privileged and elite over that of common man. Of course, that’s also a problem with any “chosen one” narrative and a good reason why fantasy writers should move away from it.

Summary

Based on all of the above, we’re left with a view of mortals who, for all practical purposes cease to exist when they die. Their lives are entirely, or mostly, predetermined in advance, depriving them of real agency and meaning in the short lifespans they do have. Whatever part of them does survive death is then eternally subjected to the Wheel of Fortune (as the medievals might call it), rising and falling in a fallen and difficult world, where the sum total will likely be more suffering than enjoyment.

That feels pretty bleak to me. I look forward to some comments that provide some correct and lead to a better view of the Wheel of Time cosmology.