The Lost Temple of Dirthamen - Part 2
The Lost Temple of Dirthamen is an ancient temple dedicated to the elven god Dirthamen. It is located in the northeastern Orlais, off the northern coast of the Waking Sea. Along the years many treasure hunters went after the wealth inside it, but they never returned.
[This is part of the series “Playing DA like an archaeologist”]
Sanctuary
The Sanctuary is a big chamber of the similar dimensions than the petitioning chamber in the Temple of Mythal.
When we enter we see four Humanoid Mythal statue in the centre. The walls at the sides of the entrance display different enigmatic details: a winged, insectoid halla; an elvhen warrior, a lizardman, and two mosaics: a dual mosaic of Falon'Din in a usual green colour, and Ghilan'nain's mosaic in RED.
The Sanctuary is made of two levels, as most elven temples are: on the lower level there is a pool with elven owl statues, where several altars are arranged in a semi circle. The first floor is collapsed and falling apart, impossible to access to.
Let's see each of these walls and the information they contain:
The lizard man painting shows the note of the dead mercenary that I already spoke about.
The wall beside the lizard displays a red mosaic. This mosaic was such a pain in the neck for me. I could not see it in my game due to the darkness of this Temple, and the screenshots were also too dark. Until I realised the reason of its darkness was because the colour itself: unlike the other mosaics which appear in light green, this one is dark red. I had to take a screenshot blindly and then break its saturation and brightness to make it visible at least. That's the reason of the bad quality image above. On the second image, I overlapped the Ghilan’nain's mosaic, to be sure there were no alterations hidden with the darkness. And as it can be seen, there are none, the only odd thing is that the mosaic is too cut off to frame properly the halla.
Behind this mosaic we find the Path of Secrets, where we find another painting of a lizardman marked by an elven owl statue. The implications that Ghilan’nain is hiding a secret of arcane nature, keeps bringing a lot of connections with The Horror of Hormak.
Along the temple we collect pieces of the codex The Lost Temple of Dirthamen, which explains how a small group of disciples of Dirthamen were informed by their High Priest that Dirthamen was gone. They fear their secrets can be extracted from them, so they despair. Their High Priest tries to comfort them, telling them they are safe as well as their secrets, but they [as disciples of the arts of secrets] can see his deception: apparently, the High Priest wants to perform a ritual using the blood of the disciples to trap them all in this temple [it's our blood he seeks, a sacrifice dark and unholy, a prison of evil to keep us in and all else out]. The next stanza seems to mean that the ritual was meant to remove the secrets that the disciples knew, but they rebelled, performing a counter-ritual in which they dismembered their High Priest and bounded him with them into the dark silence of this temple.
What I like to highlight here is that there is a repetition of the bounding process all over the game DAI:
It's quite clear that the High Priest and disciples of Dirthamen have a deep knowledge in bounding rituals. They seem to be made out of blood magic as well.
In the context of DAI, we are presented with another bounding process: the one that the Grey Warden perform via blood magic to raise an army of demons. This knowledge was shared by Corypheus.
That Corypheus knew about it means that he potentially learnt it from elven magic [as we know a lot of Tevinter magical knowledge ended up being a co-opt from elvhen knowledge when the empire was falling apart]
Recently, in Tevinter Nights: The Horror of Hormak, we have access to information that allows us to speculate that Ghilan’nain was responsible for the magic that transformed creatures into chimeras and bounded creatures with different souls to one body. Therefore, her mosaic in this Temple could potential imply that she also knew the secret of some powerful magic related to a bounding process.
All this means that, potentially, the elvhenan may have always known means to bound people, spirits, and bodies.
So, with all these bits of information and speculations, I like to interpret that, this temple, showing us a dual mosaic of Falon'Din at the entrance of the main chamber where "Dirthamen's wisdom" is hidden could potentially mean that Falon'Din bounded Dirthamen to his own will. This would explain why Dirthamen's favoured animals are blurred with Falon'Din's and why their tales always blend one another.
Sadly we don't know when this event in the Lost Temple of Dirthamen happened. We know this tragedy was triggered by the disappearance of Dirthamen, which is not clear if it was caused by Solas with the creation of the Veil or before that time. If that were the case, it could also justify the hypothesis that Dirthamen had been bounded to Falon'Din's will long time ago. Why would Falon'Din do that to Dirthamen? Solas told us that Falon'Din’s vanity was enormous, and it was implied that he would take any measure to increase the amount of worshippers [even to challenge Elgar’nan, according to old codices], so maybe acquiring the secrets of Dirthamen could have helped him in that endeavour. However, all this falls in the field of speculation.
Rooms accessible from Sanctuary
Through the Sanctuary we have access to more chambers where we keep collecting the pieces of the High Priest of Dirthamen. Each time we take a piece, we see a Fade-rift effect.
In these extra rooms and corridors, we have access to more chambers that have little difference to all what we have been seeing so far: all funerary, crypt-like chambers behind locked gates.
There are only 2 rooms that have some interesting content, one beside the other:
One of these rooms, called the chamber of torment, is guarded by two sitting Fen’Harel. At their base they have books, an elvhen box, and these white objects with a wing-shaped symbol on it that are presumed to be Vallaslin ink.
The other room is marked with the elven owl statue, where we find the Path of Secrets.
This path is behind the red mosaic: the path of secrets. It’s marked with an elven owl statue. The wall at our right displays the painting of a lizardman. In front of it, there are inuksuit, including the Red inuksuk. We also see ragged Dalish hide and urns.
If we climb up the stairs, we find another Red inuksuk on the handrail, the Archer statue, and more inuksuit that keep updating the codex of the Lost Temple of Dirthamen. Usually the Archers keep pointing out a place where to go, but in this case they only mark a veilfire brazier.
Complete the Ritual
Once all the parts of the body are collected we can go to the Sanctuary and place them on the altars.
When we approach the main desk in this ritual configuration, we notice that the desk is made of a dark metal, and has a picture of a pointy tower. Both elements look more like Tevinter style than Elvhen.
The same object can be found in the Fade, at the sides of the eagles which gives us access to a place with many claws of Dumat and Tevinter objects [For more detail, see the post related to Fade].
Finally, here we have the last part of Explorers in the Temple (stained notes). It explains that the mercenaries saw Gretien running away from the Temple at night. They assumed it was because the nightmares caused by the “voices”. The same ones he used to dismiss, according to previous notes. Not wanting to waste months of works, the mercenaries attempt to finish the ritual and get money from the treasures in this place. As the codex continues: these mercenaries deciphered Lord Gretien's notes and performed the ritual without him. They also comment that the scholar reached to the conclusion that this ritual was a way to "reassemble" the High Priest. This mercenary clearly is not a specialist in Elven culture, we can agree on that, yet he finds it unsettling that the elves would dismember their own priest. We are seeing a side of ancient elven culture that, curiously, looks like very Tevinter.
Since these notes have dried blood, it is clearly that they performed the ritual, summoned the demons, and got wounded. By the body found beside the entrance to the Sanctuary, we can be sure that most of them perished or escaped to never come back.
Once the ritual is completed, we see a rift appear, summoning the Highest One, who is now a despair demon. I assume the rest of the demons that come with him are the disciples. They mutually bounded themselves to this Temple.
Anyway, once we kill the demons, we have access to the main chamber of this place [the main door is decorated with two Falon'Din's mosaics].
This room shows the elements of an Elvhen Temple that I was expecting: golden elvhen patterns on the door frames and walls, beige mosaics, gigantic imposing golden statues, in this case of a pair of Howling Fen'Harel [I had to modify the brightness of some images to make them a little more visible at the expense of making them look uglier]. There are more inuksuit around [which makes sense if we think in what Solas told us about Falon'Din: He would massacre a lot of people in wars to increase his worshippers out of vanity, so his Temple may look more like crypts. At this point I keep wondering why this temple is called "of Dirthamen". Nothing here makes reference to him, but everything seems related to Falon’Din.
These statues are made of gold. It's strange that the main chamber of the Temple of Dirthamen [or Falon'Din] has central figures of wolves. Would that mean that there are more wolves in the elvhen pantheon than Fen'Harel?
Where the loot lays there is a bigger mosaic on the floor, displaying a sun, surrounded by circles and its centre has a similar asterik-shape to that one found in the Mural of the titans. As if this were the representation of an elven-orb or a titan's heart.
In a corner we find a book with a cover I don't think has much of interest. We find an elvhen box and that strange white item that apparently it's ink, according to the game files. We also find some Dalish elements [the fence made of hide] that may have belonged to some ancient Dalish explorers.
The loot is a shield called Dirthamen's Wisdom, what the scholar Gretien was looking for. It has a very Tevinter style, and its description says that the power contained in this shield is so great that prevented the item and the temple from falling apart due to decay. This implies that the Temple will fall soon after we remove this item from here.
The loot is a box with a symbol we had seen in the elven funerary lid.
The Lost Temple of Dirthamen: Part 1 - Part 2
[Index page of Dragon Age Lore ]