Is there a Kilrathi hell?

Shaggy

Shaggy

Vice Admiral
Has Kilrathi hell been established anywhere and is there a name to go with it. I know the KS compilation of manuals lists some terms for disgraced and hesitant kats but I haven't been able to find anything beyond that.
 
petco? where pets go? Sorry couldnt stop myself. That is an interesting question . In privateer they talk about "gaining another slave for the afterworld" when they get kills.
 
That's rather interesting. I'd always invision Kilrathi "heaven" to be along the lines of Elysium or Valhalla. I never really got into WC lore though, only the games.
 
I think in FC a name for a Kilrathi hell is mentioned. They name the planet (or moon?) the Terran and Kilrathi survivors land on so...I'll check.

EDIT: Just checked, False Colors (Englisch version) p. 152ff.: "Nargrast". Form the book:

"Apparently that was the name for one of the hells of Kilrathi mythology, and the description his Cat opposite number had provided of the place it was an apt name indeed. Nargrast, the planet, was a frozen waste..."

So apparently, they have multiple hells and at least one of them is cold.
 
Ralgha explains in Freedom Flight that Kilrathi souls will be lost in the "Great Dark" (as opposed to the "Light of Sivar") if the Sivar-Eshrad ceremony is disrupted.
 
Ah cool, thanks for the replies.
I've often wondered about how the Kilrathi see heaven and hell, and what they call. It might have been interesting to see a novelization of Prophecy for that very reason, since the arrival of the Nephilim are so closely tied to Kilrathi religious beliefs, it would have been an excellent opportunity to really flesh out that aspect of the Kilrathi society.
 
From what I read in the books and the Tomes of Sivar website, their "afterlife" is similar to the beliefs of the Kzinti.

Heaven - unlike human heaven, Kilrathi heaven is a vast hunting ground with plenty of prey (food animals) to be hunted and killed. Those they have killed in life are "slaves" and "servents" for them in the afterlife. It's appearance is like a cross between jungles and savanahs (much like their ancestrial hunting lands and pride/clan lands).

Hell - aka "the Nargrast" (or "void") is a barren land where the dishonored go. There are no prey, no slaves/servents, and they are tormented by those they failed in life. Appearance is equally void'ish in that its barren rock, I guess a lot like our moon or perhaps cold like our moon but vast and barren somewhat like the Nevada salt-flats (but no warmth... its a cold place).

Basis from Kzinti - If the Kilrathi further mirror Larry Niven's Kzinti, then their two possible "afterlife" locations are based on the two vastly different locations of their homeworld's twin moons. One is a vast jungle-savanah mix (one big happy hunting ground) and the other is a cold desolate hell-hole.

Demons and the like - I have read little in either case (Kzinti or Kilrathi) of if they have a concept of "reincarnation" or "undead" (zombies). While Kzinti do encounter "a vampire like species" in the Ringworld novels, as well as "carrion eaters" (eaters of rotten flesh in Ringworld), both of those cases were actual "living" species and were not supernatural/unnatural. (Ringworld's carrion eaters were a natural species picked up by its builders and used as a form of waste-reduction to help speed the conversion of dead bodies into, well, fertilizer.

Additionally there are a few references of "the monsters of hell" but unlike human beliefs where these unnatural/supernatural creatures can escape hell to wreck havoc on the living, the one and only case of "escaped monstered of hell" I've found are Kilrathi references to the Mantu/Nephillum.
 
Well, if those in Kilrathi hell failed people that went to Kilrathi Heaven, do souls wander from time to time to leave heaven so as to torture those in hell?
 
From what I read in the books and the Tomes of Sivar website, their "afterlife" is similar to the beliefs of the Kzinti.
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The Kilrathi /look like/ the Kzinti -- that's as far as the connection goes.(Furthermore, the vast majority of 'Kzinti culture' was written after the original Wing Commander came out; remember, we had Ringworld and The Warriors in 1990... all the second party stuff came later.)

Hell - aka "the Nargrast" (or "void") is a barren land where the dishonored go. There are no prey, no slaves/servents, and they are tormented by those they failed in life. Appearance is equally void'ish in that its barren rock, I guess a lot like our moon or perhaps cold like our moon but vast and barren somewhat like the Nevada salt-flats (but no warmth... its a cold place).
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This sounds like someone trying to force multiple facts into one overly-human interpretation; we know that "one of" the Kilrathi hells is named Nargrast... and also that, more than anything, Kilrathi fear a void or lack of an afterlife. Those don't have to be the same thing - and all indications are, from those facts alone, that they aren't.
 
Bandit LOAF said:
This sounds like someone trying to force multiple facts into one overly-human interpretation; we know that "one of" the Kilrathi hells is named Nargrast... and also that, more than anything, Kilrathi fear a void or lack of an afterlife. Those don't have to be the same thing - and all indications are, from those facts alone, that they aren't.
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Sounds like you are implying that the Kilrathi hell is oblivion... but I thought oblivion was the Mantu belief? "I go into the Blackness!"

Or is it that the Kilrathi hell is more like Dante's inferno, specific hells for specific crimes?
 
frostytheplebe said:
Sounds like you are implying that the Kilrathi hell is oblivion... but I thought oblivion was the Mantu belief? "I go into the Blackness!"
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You mean the Nephilim? They're very different than the Mantu. "Blackness" is very ambiguous and can mean a lot of things.
 
Good catch. Yeah, I think their hell is somewhat leveled like Dante's Inferno and a barren landscape, not a true "Void / Oblivion" as the bugs see it.

Again I've seen parallels though in teh Kilrathi and Kzinti as to a special fear of death in space. Its as though if they die dishonored on a ship, or a planet, then at least they have that much in the afterlife (wrecked hull, barren landscape, hardly makes a difference. At least it still has "something" there. A wrecked ship like a carrier or destroyer has enough mass that the bulk of the superstructure will hang around. There's a memory of air, a memory of sounds and smells. There's a "deathly remnants" or "reminder of what life was". A concept of there being enough external reference that the self-spirit can maintain itself on memory.

However, that being said...

If they die as a fighter pilot in space, their fighter pretty much gets blown to bits and the very low mass gets scattered very quickly by solar winds, other fighters, etc. They truely get "trapped in the black hell" because they don't even have a wrecked ship to sit on. The caress of a "true void" becomes much more real, much more frightening, because you loose any external self-reference points.

Alternately explained why this is a terrifying death:

I don't know of the human term for it, but the phoenix term I've learned is "using internal memory like a battery". If you have external remnants you have external reference points, thus you draw on your own internal memories more slowly because your mind is more distracted from doubting its own existance. Without the external reference points to distract you, your mind-spirit "drains the battery" more quickly.

The scary thing is, the chart runs on a curve much like the E=mc^2 formula, except the "E" is your existance and the "m" is the mass of memories.

When that battery runs out, well, you start becoming less of a "self-entity with importance and concept of self" and more of a "tiny insignificant part of a larger thing, unable to determine importance with an ever increasing doubt that are real or at least once were real." Which means that your spirit/soul/whatever has ever increasing difficulty identifying itself as a seperate entity from the rest of reality/existance. You loose the ability to process information at any level... sentient thought (as any living thing would recognize it) would become increasingly random and intermittant.
 
Sounds like you are implying that the Kilrathi hell is oblivion... but I thought oblivion was the Nephilim belief? "I go into the Blackness!"
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I think that maybe, just maybe, the connection between the religious beliefs of the Kilrathi and the religious beliefs of the alien race that began the Kilrathi religion was intentional. :)

Good catch. Yeah, I think their hell is somewhat leveled like Dante's Inferno and a barren landscape, not a true "Void / Oblivion" as the bugs see it.
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It's not a good catch because it isn't based on anything in particular, beyond the already cited mention that Nargrast was named after "a hell" from Kilrathi mythology. The other information, again already discussed in this thread, comes straight from Freedom Flight: "The warriors that perished in the battle to take Firekka are no longer Sivar's favored servants; they are simply his fighters, standing between the Light of Sivar and the Great Dark which ever threatens the Light and seeks to devour souls. Because the ceremony was corrupted, those that survived cannot dedicate themselves to Sivar for the coming year, and they fear their souls will be lost in the Great Dark if they perish in combat."

Again I've seen parallels though in teh Kilrathi and Kzinti as to a special fear of death in space. Its as though if they die dishonored on a ship, or a planet, then at least they have that much in the afterlife (wrecked hull, barren landscape, hardly makes a difference. At least it still has "something" there. A wrecked ship like a carrier or destroyer has enough mass that the bulk of the superstructure will hang around. There's a memory of air, a memory of sounds and smells. There's a "deathly remnants" or "reminder of what life was". A concept of there being enough external reference that the self-spirit can maintain itself on memory.
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I don't think Wing Commander makes any of these claims at any point; there's nothing about a particular fear of death in space to begin with... and the rest is increasingly out there.

You're also reading far, far too much into the quote that the Kilrathi are "based on" the Kzinti. Their *appearance* is based on the Kzinti - jungle cats in space. Especially, though, the Kilrathi aren't based on the Kzinti you're talking about... which simply didn't exist in 1989. The Kzinti which existed when the Kilrathi were created were the mysterious enemy in The Warriors, the pink cats in a Star Trek animated episode and Speaker-to-Animals in the first two Ringworld novels.
 
Well, aside from reading too much into Kilrathi by adding/combining it with the different yet sometimes similar Kzinti is true.

I'm also using broader conceptualizations and more in-depth explanation based on the resulting extrapolated theory.

I'll admit I might not be as accurate, but my explanations also give a deeper, more colorful and meaningful picture of their kind of view on things.

Its like comparing a photo done in black, white, and 1 kind of gray (so total of 3 color states) to a photo done in black, white, and 7+ different kinds of gray (9+ total color states). .....The former (3 color state) might be good enough to display something basic like a cube, but wouldn't do a sphere very well. The latter (9+ color state) would not only do a sphere but could do a glass sphere complete with buildings around it with images reflecting through the sphere as well as reflecting off its surface.

A wordy way of putting it, but you get my point. I don't have to be 100% right... I'm trying to show how vastly different their thoughts and ways are.
 
Hobbes says "join Sivar, kilrahra" when killing (in WC2?). I interpret this on two ways.

1. Refering to enemy as kilrahra, of lower class, is an insult. Yet he tells him to join Sivar; I think this suggests there's only one afterlife, all by/connected to Sivar (although this one realm of the dead could of course consist of different areas). It's also possible that death in honorable battle means you have a place in heaven and as Hobbes knows and respects this, he can't tell opponent to go to hell.

2. This might actually be a sympathetic comment. If Hobbes has reason to believe his enemy is kilrahra (and he doesn't know his name), he might be using the word just factually and not as insult. In this case he seems sorry to kill a fellow warrior and "join Sivar" is like a prayer for him.

To me it sounds he says "kilrahra" as an insult, but hard to say.
 
Interesting avenue of thought -- although I took from Freedom Flight that Ralgha isn't an especially religious kil (doesn't he talk about how he no longer believes, after the death of his family? I'd have to check to be sure); the line seems to be more along the lines of Indiana Jones' "prepare to meet Kali... in hell!" than it is a deeper comment as to how the Kilrathi afterlife works.
 
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