And if Raxxla is Milton's "pendent world" how long is the "golden chain/staircase"??
Good point, technically paradise as I recall was outside and just below the Empyrean, so not actually part of heaven. But it was no where near hell.
I understand Milton appropriated this chain motif from Greek mythology, but essentially as I interpret, it was also to give his reader comfort, essentially saying although paradise was not part of heaven it wasn’t too far removed and could be pulled up.
From my recollection Hell was as expansive as heaven, but unlike heaven was enclosed by a ceiling, a prison. Heaven had no sky but it had a boundary wall which was inclined by a living steep hill or battlement.
Paradise the pendant globe, was created after the war in heaven on the
‘brink’ of chaos and could be reached with relative ease, by humans and angels, advocating in my opinion the chain was not long in comparison.
The staircase to heavens gate was retractable, but wasn’t a ladder, so it advocated paradise probably hung just off away from the gate. Interestingly Satans viaduct or bridge was also attached to paradise after the second fall, fixing it in place…
When Satan walked on the outside of the pendant globe (a fascinating visual concept) he accidentally finds limbo and like it the outer sphere of the globe is still beset by the storms of chaos.
In game I believe the zone of chaos / storm gods has an intensional boundary. Visually when mapped they form a bubble.
Logically then Paradise if it is Raxxla, and the game is following this Miltonian model, ought to be on Chaos’s
outer rim.
Logically it ought to be somewhere in the Northern or Northwestern aspect, this is based on
one accepted interpretation of the text, but others do exist
which conflict this, so this injects a level of
doubt into my hypothesis, my current theory is only based off hypothesis assumptions of the data provided…
I feel the Greek compass in game is our ‘current’ option, unless another can be found. I think it odd it’s included in the game, and can only surmise it was done so intentionally, otherwise everything is simply arbitrary and this theory falls totally apart.
Again I only promote this theory in the absence of any other information.
So theoretically we don’t actually need to know the
length of the chain, we only need to know where chaos starts and a general indication of where the gate of heaven is relatively.
I presume it’s intentionally left ambiguous to make it difficult, but likewise I presume a number of ambiguous clues are provided to establish this vague area, for instance in the area I’m ‘currently’ advocating - there are a number of systems named after lost realms or paradises; oddly much like in the Lost Realms in the lower celestial sphere….
There is we have to likewise consider that the advent of the Brookes Tours was placed internationally to highlight not just his wider influence in game but the underworld zone, and or likewise the Lost Realms zone, which if not just a Holdstock Easter egg, might still be an example of a perversion of heaven and maybe Raxxla is hidden there, but we are then going against the Miltonian concept of paradise hanging from heaven ….
