Hi guys I am Inotia King a youtuber, redditor and gamer who likes theorizing about the story. I actually cobbled together a list of some of my more important theories with respect to the game Genshin Impact and Star Rail that I have been basing all of my newer theories on. I'll be putting more of those up on Hive along with new stuff but if you're impatient I also archived all my theories here. I hope some of you guys are game theorists too. Let's try to figure out these great games together!
(This article was originally put up on reddit.)
Last time I talked about my theory for Albedo and that coincided with not believing in theories that the Sustainer is actually the product of Rhinedottir and the completion of the Magnum Opus. So if I don't believe that what do I think she is?
I'm assuming you guys have clicked on the "click here" link at the top by now so you know who I think she is but what does that make her? In Gnosticism the basic story goes like this: You have the true god. He resides in a separate realm from the physical world called the Pleroma and in that space are the dyads of paired Aeons. One of those Aeons Sophia accidentally creates a defect and casts it away. This defect becomes a lower god that then creates the physical world we all reside in. So this version of Christianity then believes that even if we die and go to heaven it's the wrong kind of heaven. We need to attain gnosis to get beyond that and reach the Pleroma and the true god.
Where am I going with this? I know there are theories out there on who all these players are. Most of it is based on the information we got from Enkanomiya which is when we were introduced to several new entities. You have the "Primordial One" Phanes. You have the four shining shades that it created. And it's heavily implied that one of those shining shades is the God of Time Istaroth. We're also given hints about the timeline. At some arbitrary point in the past "the world was created for the humans" by Phanes breaking open its eggshell. Then it found the reigning creatures the vishaps and the Seven Sovereigns and defeated them. Then something else came to challenge Phanes and the Enkanomiyans call it the "Second Who Came." After that battle ended Enkanomiya was plunged into the sea, the Archon War happened, the Seven rose to power, skip a few thousand years we arrive at the present.
With that information the theories go on to suggest that Phanes is the First Throne of Heaven and Celestia is the Second. Celestia defeated Phanes and established the fake sky which is the current system. That makes Phanes representative of the true god and Celestia that defective lower god. Sometimes this also means that Sophia also exists and was either the basis for the world Celestia reigns over or other times she herself is Celestia.
I think these theories are missing just that one little thing so let's get into that.
So a while ago I made a topic Archon 101. Using this theory as a blueprint we can first confirm a few things and that should lead us to figuring out what the Sustainer is.
One major change to everybody else’s theories that I’d like to make is who that First Throne is. Well not who but what the significance is. See the thing is Phanes can't be the true god. If we go back to Gnosticism the true god was around in the very beginning. Everything else came after it. The one that appears after and then goes on to create its own world would be that defective lower god. Now if we look back at the Enkanomiya stuff which most of these theories base themselves on we can see that Phanes arrived on Teyvat (which may or may not actually be named this; I'll get to that in a sec) and remade it. Phanes is Celestia and collectively they are the First Throne of Heaven. (I mean actually Celestia is just that floating island Phanes is staying at. This btw also lines up with what Nahida says about the First Descender.)
So with Phanes being the god in Celestia and therefore its shades are also up there we can continue to piece together the earliest legends. Another description of this entity from outside of the world is the sun chariot. In Records of Jueyun Volume 6 a sun chariot plummeted into the ground and this would end up creating the Chasm. According to the Vermillion Hereafter Artifact Set this thing has been around since Morax was young which means anywhere in the last 6000 or so years. Back to Records and it stated that the occupant of this chariot was arrogant with a temper which also fits with the Celestia we know.
Another thing about this sun chariot is that it is also referred to as the morning stars and these stars in the Moonlit Bamboo Forest Volume 3 are known to be what the Moon Sisters Aria, Sonnet and Canon love as much as they loved each other. And this gets us to the meat of this topic.
So right now the set up is: There was a world, it was ruled over by these sisters, then one day Phanes arrived and it was said to ride on a sun chariot or be referred to as the morning stars and the sisters came to love it. So far everything is nice and peaceful but we also know that this sun chariot guy is arrogant with a temper.
One day a traveler arrived. They ended up meeting and falling in love with a Seelie ancestor one of the beings that existed around this time. The sisters and the other Seelie ancestors blessed this union but this was the beginning of the end. Here I'd like to clarify something with the localization. In the English version it states that the Moon Sisters took turns ruling the night skies each month and if this didn't happen then disaster would ensue. But actually in the original Chinese it's the reverse. Calamity happened and then they wouldn't trade places. It's pretty much just saying that if something big happened it would throw off the normal routine of the world. (This trading places thing is actually a reference to the old Chinese calendar where a month had thirty days split into three weeks of ten days. You can also compare it to the three phases of the visible moon: waxing, full, waning.) The disaster was that somebody disagreed with the union and based on the other things that happened around this time one guess as to who that person was.
Yes I'm pointing to Phanes and I think this was where everything started. Ok so it disagreed with the union between the Seelie and this unknown traveler. Why? To figure that out we go right back to the Gnostic story. Eventually the true god realizes what this lower god has been doing and sends Aeons down to help humanity. One of these Aeons would be its creator Sophia. But there's also a part of this story where because she improperly made this defective god she "fell" and became the Achamoth. And I think this is that story which is also told by Venti in the Gnostic Chorus.
So here you have Phanes in this world and it shouldn't be there. The "glorious kingdom" sends down its princess to find the Genesis Pearl (see that Albedo topic) which would help the humans ascend. Phanes the lower god doesn't want that to happen so it goes on the attack. At this point Sophia is just a traveler. She likely has immense power but she wasn't tasked with fighting a war. So she's defeated and we know what happened to the traveler after that. She was torn from her Seelie lover and both of them had their memories erased. This lines up with Venti who tells us that she was deceived and made to believe she was queen to the Kingdom of Darkness, the kingdom Phanes created.
Who is the Sustainer of Heavenly Principles? The Queen of the Kingdom of Darkness, deceived and stripped of the memories of who she really is, fallen and made to protect the very thing she was meant to overcome, the Aeon Sophia. Or I should say the Second Descender and the Second Who Came.
With that established I'd like to now go over the exact steps Phanes took in all of this and what it all looked like back then.
Again you already have the world there. At this point it would be a mash-up of numberless elements and very chaotic. The dominant beings in this world are those who can harness these elements so you have the various pure elemental beings like vishaps, slimes and specters. Based on Archon 101 you guys know I also rope in the Seelies and Archons. In fact I think the Archons would be considered pure elemental beings too based on how they have been depicted. Anyway one day Phanes appears becoming the First Descender and First Throne of Heaven. We can't really be sure how malevolent it was at this point because it's far too early for any of the sources we have on hand to tell us accurately. Yes the Enkanomiyans have their story and yes Phanes doesn't want it getting out but that still doesn't mean it's the whole story.
Side Note: As of Xianyun's release we now know for sure that Archons and even some adepti are also pure elemental beings. In fact anything that relies on the amount of elemental energy they've collected to decide how strong they are and what they can do are decidedly pure elemental beings.
What we do know is that for now it's just "the stars" riding on its sun chariot and it was able to attract the Moon Sisters that ruled over the world at the time. We also know that humans existed at this time. While the Enkanomiyans believed that Phanes created them they also claim that they were created after the world which would have meant the whole world that Phanes arrived on was remade first which would also then mean the Moon Sisters were created by it too and we just don't see that anywhere else. On the other hand we actually do know the early humans lived in a world that was not very suitable to them. Check out the Prayers Artifact Series. The gods told them a new and better world was coming but this means they were already around for the older world that wasn't suitable for them. This lines up with what the Enkanomiyans also believe which is that Phanes remade the world for "our sake" which can only make sense if they already existed first.
Anyway we jump to the calamity. Sophia arrives as a traveler from afar becoming the Second Descender and Second Throne of Heaven. Whether or not her official mission was to find this Genesis Pearl isn't really important. We can even say it was her close relationship with the Seelies that made her decide to do it since we know the Seelies/Archons also want to guide humanity. She eventually falls in love with one of them and they are wed with the blessings of everybody in the world. But this mission they're now on doesn't sit well with Phanes who believes this world is its kingdom. One day it chooses to attack Sophia and the Seelie and it escalates into a massive war.
Now who are the sides in this war? We know Phanes the First Throne is opposed to Sophia the Second Throne but what about everybody else? I think it's pretty much guaranteed the Seelies were on her side. She married into the "family" after all. But what about those Moon Sisters? I mean they were infatuated with Phanes "the stars of daybreak" right? Well from what ends up happening to them I think we can figure it out.
The three sisters of the night turned against one another, leading to their eternal parting by death. Only one of their pale corpses now remains, ever shedding its cold light...
Fickle is the heart of woman. (man that quote has not aged well) But it serves our purposes here where I believe that one of these sisters decided to side with Phanes therefore turning on the other two. As for them we can't know yet what happened but we know they also turned on each other. See that last line up there? It's established that the moon we have in Teyvat is one of their corpses. It's also not the only one. Several theories have brought this up and I agree with them that the moons we see in the loading screen and the Spiral Abyss are all different moons. The loading screen depicts Celestia so that moon corpse in the loading screen would be the sister that sided with Phanes. Then you have the Teyvat one and finally for as yet unknown reasons one of the sisters also sided with the Abyss. (You'd think that was random but the Abyss has been around this whole time. More on that another day.)
Side Note: Actually following Nahida's Second Character Quest we may know why that Moon Sister sided with the Abyss. She actually sided with some of the Seelie ancestors, in this case dragons and followed their leader Nibelung to the Abyss.
Ok so the sides are set: Phanes with one of the moons vs Sophia, the Seelies and another moon vs the Abyss and its moon. That's actually Three Realms of chaos isn't it and since the destruction collapsed the heavens and rent the earth asunder it's probably about time to remake the world. Let me introduce you to the Abrahamic concept of the Firmament.
Firmament is how the world used to be described in these religions. As the picture shows it's essentially saying the world is inside one big snow globe. And what might be outside of this snow globe?
when countless gods and rulers fought over the appointed celestial seats, and the very stars and abyss themselves faded
Why is there a moon for Teyvat, Celestia and the Abyss and why do the humans think the one floating over them is the only one? Because of the fake sky of Firmament. They have been separated from both the Abyss and Celestia not to mention the real world.
Phanes, the Primordial One, used the eggshell to separate the "universe" and the "microcosm of the world."
Now look at the part before that. When Firmament was happening is also when the Archon War was taking place. But according to the Enkanomiyans Phanes created its version of the world long before any of this. Well just like how their stories have been interpreting Phanes as the true god and that it created the world before humanity even existed I don't think their timeline is all that accurate.
For proof that the timeline isn't as long as the Enkanomiyans believed I direct you to this old topic of mine. Enkanomiya was part of the unified human civilization. We know this because the people originally had Greek names and used Latin terminology. After they were lost to the sea the unified civilization period was more or less over. After Celestia attacked the humans would eventually flee into the care of the many Archons who then warred until only seven defined regions emerged. These new regions each had their own language based on what those regions were inspired from like Sumeru's Persian and Inazuma's Japanese. Greco-Roman culture and language became unrecognizable runes from a bygone age. But there's actually a poem you can find in the Chasm written by a Black Serpent Knight - aka Khaenri'ahn - that's in Latin and also mentions Barbatos. So unless this guy just happened to have family that cherished their roots so much they kept teaching a dead language for generations it's likely the unified human civilization intersected with both Khaenri'ah and also the much more recent usurping of Decarabian by the wind spirit turned Archon Barbatos - aka Archon War era. (actually Late Archon War era since Barbatos took over 2600 years ago while Liyue was already established 3700 years ago)
So it is entirely likely that the Archon War started here. We also don't know how long it took for Phanes to defeat Sophia either.
With time, disasters overturned the sovereign carriage and laid ruin to the halls of the stars.
All of it could have bled into one another as I pointed out in Archon 101 that the Seelies withering matches Archons that withered as well like Andrius. With all that said let's go back to this timeline.
Phanes was after Sophia. It had already been able to get the Moon Sisters to turn on each other which would end in their deaths and separation with each one's body strewn across their respective world's night sky. During this same time a great deal of damage was done to the physical world which broke apart the unified human civilization. Seelies had taken on the task of guiding and protecting the humans so when this disaster was happening they were also busy gathering as many survivors as they could to then give them a safe haven under their care.
Finally Phanes catches Sophia and this is the Gnostic Chorus. As Records of Jueyun Volume 4 tells us Phanes erased both Sophia and her Seelie's memories and separated them. With that done Phanes resolves the destruction by recreating the world inside of a protective shell, the Firmament aka Teyvat.
Fun fact: Teyvat comes from the Hebrew word Tevat meaning Ark and this is the Ark's Opening. Remember how I said maybe the world is called Teyvat? It is possible only the Firmament world under the fake sky is called Teyvat.
So far it looks like Phanes is just a big jerk right? Proud with an agitated temper and all. But in Gnosticism this lower god also fancies itself the real god. So it actually means well and right now the world is not looking so hot. According to the Enkanomiyans Phanes created this world of "separating the universe and the microcosm" for humanity's sake. The outside world was marked as dangerous for them. It was the world that Sophia came from. It was the world where the Abyss was. What can we call this stuff? How about "forbidden knowledge?"
As Rukkhadevata claims her forbidden knowledge that "doesn't belong to this world" came from the very bottom of the Abyss. I'll get into that in more detail some other time but we're seeing now that forbidden knowledge isn't really something that doesn't belong in the world. It probably should be in the world because it'd help the humans now trapped in the Firmament to be able to return to the world outside.
So that's the stuff outside of Teyvat. What about the stuff inside which at present was still a mess too? Well the Archons and all the humans they had been protecting during this whole conflict are still fighting. There are "evil gods" the ones who took the opportunity of a destabilized world order to do their own thing sometimes at the expense of others. We know Xiao for example used to belong to one of these guys until Morax saved him. There were also those Seelie from the legends that couldn't handle the loss of the traveler and her Seelie lover and let themselves wither away. How true that is when placed in the same period as the Archon War is anyone's guess but since we saw that Andrius could just choose to turn himself into a spirit it's very possible the Seelie that didn't want to fight might have done similarly. Finally you have the rest the ones still struggling and trying to bring peace back at least for their corner of the world.
That's the start of the Heavenly Principles. We've got the rules for the outside vs the inside. Outside is all forbidden knowledge. Outside is bad. The inside needs to be protected but look at all these crazed gods. There needs to be order. Maybe it was too much to try sorting through all the different elements. Maybe most elements turned out to be toxic for humans or too weak to honestly protect them. Whatever the reason Phanes decided on seven and went to work.
At first it was mostly hands off. You just had the Archons fighting and the strongest won. But sometimes it got messy. Andrius vs Decarabian for example. Andrius was an Archon that could control both Anemo and Cryo and he was also uninterested in protecting humans. Decarabian on the other hand was purely Anemo something that worked for Phanes. But the guy was a coward and decided to lock his people behind a barrier and call it a day. Since the people were suffering Phanes decided that that needed to change so it gets its shade Istaroth who then creates Barbatos - a single thread of the thousand winds - and ultimately Barbatos becomes the chosen Anemo Archon of the Seven. The rest of the original Seven would be the same. Phanes fought the "Sovereign" Archons like Morax and forced them into "contracts" to never divulge what they knew about the world before the Firmament. And for the ones that didn't follow these orders they were replaced like Decarabian.
Finally with all this in place Phanes took its sun chariot back into the heavens. A note about this: In the story told in Records of Jueyun it says both that the crash of the sun chariot and when it returns to the sky created the Chasm. Obviously the Chasm wasn't created twice so I think that the land around the Chasm is the crater created by the crash and here when Phanes is finally done with this new structure for its world it actually plucks the land in this crater up with it and it's actually Celestia. This is likely why the nail in this area is deep underground unlike in Dragonspine and the Sumeru desert where it's out in the open and can easily be seen as having dropped from the sky. On top of that it could explain why the water in the upside down city can disrupt the immortality curse placed on Khaenri'ahns which we know came from Celestia. It could be that when the chariot crashed some part of Phanes and its divinity leaked and so it tried to take it all back with it but didn’t manage to scrape away all of it. We’ll need more information to confirm this.
So that's the structure we're left with. Phanes and its shades dwell up in the missing piece of Teyvat's Chasm now known as Celestia. Sophia who was formerly an enemy to Phanes is now in charge of sustaining the new order of the Heavenly Principles and she oversees the Archons who in turn watch over the humans inside of the Firmament Teyvat.
And one last thing. It's not really something I believe in yet but I found it an interesting possibility. I just went through all this stuff about Sophia being the traveler from afar but what about the Seelie?
Since Seelies and Archons are the same thing what if the one mentioned Archon in all of this is actually that Seelie? The earliest thing we know about Morax is that he didn't used to be so dapper and civilized. During the early days of the Archon War he was actually a brute. It was Guizhong that eventually cultivated Morax to be more thoughtful and even Guizhong who convinced Morax to help the humans in the first place.
But what makes me think he's the Seelie that Sophia fell in love with? In Guizhong's weapon the Memory of Dust we get certain quotes from her.
What is she saying here? We just got done with a region based on Wisdom and a major part of it was that forbidden knowledge. Here's another quote from Guizhong from when she died.
It seems that our journey together has come to an end. As for that stone dumbbell, forget about it, would you?
Curious right? Why did she go back on it? The name of this weapon in Chinese is actually the Lock of the Mortal World 尘世之锁 and its design comes from the Kongming blocks which are a deceptive series of blocks that can be locked together in place because of grooves that become hidden when the puzzle is fully assembled.
What if Guizhong was an Archon who was close to Morax and Sophia from the time they were together? What if a side-effect of Morax getting his mind wiped was losing that intuitive side to himself which devolved him into an uncaring brute? What if Guizhong recorded her memories into the Memory of Dust as a Trojan Horse against Phanes. The memories would remind Morax of who he actually was at just the right time so that he could mount a rescue of Sophia and possibly rebel against Phanes at the same time finally undoing its lock on the world of mortals. In the weapon's lore we're left with a cliffhanger. So far Morax has been unable to solve the puzzle. Wouldn't it be exciting if one day he does and it's this revelation?
Side Note: I should also mention Morax seems to be moving in this direction anyway. His deal with the Tsaritsa forfeited his Gnosis and he agrees with her motives just not her actions. It's as if his true personality has been seeping out this whole time though he doesn't realize how close he's been to this.
Alright but if the Sustainer is Genshin's version of Sophia and she's also the Second Descender to Phanes being the First then what about the Third Descender? And what was that stuff about the bottom of the Abyss? How was the Abyss even a thing back during the Moon Sister days?
Stay tuned.
Topic originally created on November 27th, 2022.
