[The Sharmat]

I'm still not convinced. I think they're an artifact of raw faith. You believe in someone hard enough, you'll see halos.

[Cüréthañ]

I'm still not convinced. I think they're an artifact of raw faith. You believe in someone hard enough, you'll see halos.

Same thing, to me. .
Thing is, several characters see the same thing without any collusion.  Imagine if all schizophrenics heard the same 'voices' and saw the same visual hallucinations.
Scientifically, we would be forced to consider that there was probably something consistent and external underlying the condition.
The 'halo-cinations' come from the outside.  Madness is a specific kind of belief, and insanity is described as the outside leaking into Earwa via the soul.

[mrganondorf]

I'm still not convinced. I think they're an artifact of raw faith. You believe in someone hard enough, you'll see halos.

Same thing, to me. .
Thing is, several characters see the same thing without any collusion.  Imagine if all schizophrenics heard the same 'voices' and saw the same visual hallucinations.
Scientifically, we would be forced to consider that there was probably something consistent and external underlying the condition.
The 'halo-cinations' come from the outside.  Madness is a specific kind of belief, and insanity is described as the outside leaking into Earwa via the soul.

lovely!  kellhus' 'madness' is ajokli bleeding into the world!

[mrganondorf]

i think it's fun to imagine what would have happened at caraskand without the circumfix

either the zaudunyani miss sarcellus (so he doesn't run to conphas) or they straight up kill him, then martimus kills conphas and kellhus steps into the vacuum

he could always flee and plan to become a fanim prophet, but if he stays, he's facing a nearly impossible schedule of learning gnostic or anagogic sorcery so motivated the troops out of the gate is one big problem and getting them to win is another

maybe if he devoted himself to no other tasks, he could learn the simpler anagogis fast enough to warp out and assassinate the padirajah or do like his dad and warp the scarlet spires here and there, destroying shit and disappearing? 

maybe the cishaurim are the deciding factor whatever--they make sure that whatever kellhus does sees him dominating more people of the 3 seas???

maybe kellhus incites the zaudunyani to fight the orthodox as part of a pact with the padirajah?  or he simply has the holy war accept the padirajah's peace offering and he settles down somewhere in kian content to dominate the 3 seas more slowly?

[The Sharmat]

Same thing, to me. .
Thing is, several characters see the same thing without any collusion.  Imagine if all schizophrenics heard the same 'voices' and saw the same visual hallucinations.
Scientifically, we would be forced to consider that there was probably something consistent and external underlying the condition.
The 'halo-cinations' come from the outside.  Madness is a specific kind of belief, and insanity is described as the outside leaking into Earwa via the soul.

Or something consistent and internal. Some paranoid delusions are far more common than others. My mother works at a mental hospital. A common phenomenon among their patients is "the Terminator thing". The idea that a revolt by intelligent machines is immanent.

Maybe the halos are consistent between crazy people because they're a consistent thing in Three Seas culture. (I say just for the sake of argument, I'm not totally convinced of that myself)

[Wilshire]

There are certainly a lot of cases of people experiencing similar hallucinations.  Government spying on you constantly and robots replacing people are somewhat common-ish delusions.

Like you said TS, its possible that halos are a common cultural thing and that crazies would happen to see the same thing, but it seems really unlikely, especially because we don't really see any mentally ill people in PoN (at least, not of the kind we are talking about).

[The Sharmat]

Everyone is a little bit crazy, though. Sanity being kind of arbitrary in a world where no one is truly objective can be argued to be a theme of the first trilogy.

[Wilshire]

Not at all. If anything, the halo's point to an objectivity existing more profoundly in Earwa than irl.

[The Sharmat]

But they don't, necessarily, as has been discussed up thread.

I guess it depends on what you mean by "objective".

[Francis Buck]

I guess it depends on what you mean by "objective".

I think the matter of objectivity and subjectivity, in particular the individual definitions/meanings of such things, are a theme that's pretty core to TSA and I suspect there will be some kind of reckoning regarding the nature of these concepts actually function in Earwa, come TUC.

As a result I'm of two minds about the halo's "being real". I do think there's an element of mass hysteria/delusion involved (somewhat only because I think that applies to basically everything in the series), but I think it may also be a commentary on that sort of thing, since we've been shown (repeatedly) what we as people from the Real World assume to be religious-mumbo-jumbo ends up being REAL in Earwa. Places are actually haunted. Gods actually exist, and frequently intervene with mundane life.

Earwa is intrinsically a meaningful place. There, “madness” or “being crazy” straight up do not have the same cost-benefit ratio that they do IRL, at least not for now. A schizophrenic in our world makes connections that don't actually exist because our universe lacks any intrinsic meaning at all (in theory). In Earwa, everything has meaning, everything is bundled up with meaningfulness – lunacy, in some capacity at least, allows one to see things “more clearly” I think, but perhaps only on a higher level, and at the expense of clarity for the “mundane”, everyday world.

Also, two things stand out from TGO for me:

(click to show/hide)

At one point, Kellhus looks down to the haloes and ponders "how difficult to explain they are". This doesn't really jive for me if it's just another belief-makes-real situation, which at this stage of the series is, relatively-speaking, not particularly difficult to explain to either the audience or the characters (such as Proyas), especially by TGO where the philosophy is on steroids.

Secondly, Kellhus also ruminates on how the walls of the eleven pole chamber are deliberately black to make the haloes more obvious or apparent. If the haloes are completely false and exist only in the minds of people, then this would be pointless. The haloes would be as bright as the person believed them to be.

My idea as to the strange qualities of the haloes (and the reason they cast no light) is because they are akin to the way Cnaiur's strange “overlapping” appearance as Ciphrang. Whatever the haloes are, they are like a shadow of Kellhus's future/destiny, which exists atemporally as all things related to the Outside do.