The Sacred And Terrible Mythopoepedia of Elysium

Welcome to my personal definitive Mythopoepedia on the entire (entire) world of Elysium, from the book Sacred and Terrible Air, the video game Disco Elysium, and publically available information given during its genesis, development and current catastrophic state.

Being a fictional universe, studying Elysium is more of an artistic analysis endeavor than an academic one. This is why i do not call my attempt an "Encyclopedia", but a "Mythopoepedia" (Mythopoeia + Pedia). That is, a guess on what is Elysium is telling us about itself (and us). Although not particularily academic myself, my goal is to dissect the myth of Elysium and bring to light the amazing depth that it withelds. For better fluiditiy, i will often refer to my work as "SATME", and the campus of work analysed here as the "SATADE", or "The Myth". Elysium is behind it.

SATME will include :

Diagrams and artistic interpretation of Elysium's topography, from the Isolas to their continents, their regions, landmarks and national layouts.

A historical chronology of Elysium, with more speculative, "hopefully fulfilling" iterations as to complete what is implied. There will be illustrations of events too.

A retrospective of every single known character and figures in both the book and game (what's wrong with me) and ?...* As well as artistic interprations of the unseen ones.

Speculative engineering - Illustrated.

Pseudo-Speculative physics (Most notably on Entroponetics, but also cosmology and potentially the very nature of space and reality)

A section on demography and the cyclopean casualities of war.

Hopefully exhaustive take on the linguistics of Elysium.

Seol.

The ancient mass society, and the satellites.

...And the crossing of these fields. Maybe there will be more, but those are the most proeminent sections.

Now problem is, we don't know many absolutely certain things about Elysium. We mostly get vague accounts, themselves with layers of bias. Though, we also get objective, omniscient ones. Deciphering which is which can be tricky, and sometimes even skills like Encyclopedia or the narration of the book are vague enough to cause doubt within me. Most things that you can analyse in SATADE has tenfolds of conclusions.

That is why when some information is too blurry or unspecific, i will provide multiple interprations of it. In the realm of theory-crafting, we often base an assumption on another assumption. It becomes trickier if we consider multiple assumptions at once. To solve this problem, i will divide them within Clusters, each telling a more or less different story of what Elysium doesn't directly tell us.

Watching the last episode of Noclip's documentary made me explode when i first saw it. Finally i could see Mundi's topography... And oh boy there's so much to unpack from them. Same thing from the third episode, where i was blasted with not only Gottwald and Villabolos, but fucking Tabalt and downstream Magritte, a whole set of completely unkown Graad ethnostates and MANY landlocked Lilmaaran regions, as well as. Whatever Prospekt Vostok is ? I was cooking ravioli when i saw it. I almost boiled myself from excitement

I obsevered all of them for a very long time already, i have a lot ot say. This isn't something i will elaborate in this post. My foremost conclusion though is that the maps dates a lot, and consequencially are quite inaccurate to the later lore. Also wdym the SRV was originally in Graad ?

The map reinforced that there is so much to Elysium that we just don't know and can't know. Not just ultra abyssal pale superdeep lore but also things we can straight up not speculate on. That's what i love so much with the research, i hype myself so much that when i actually get to discover something totally new.... I mean if you're here you get it i imagine. Whatever. Here's a triangulated map of the 8/81 made from the menu screen.

First draft of this quite silly endeavor

Second edition i worked on in... *checks brain fog temporal map* february. The motorway is squished, because i was trying to stick two points of reference from the inlet to the motorway coordinated with terrain level.... I'll shape it out better when the Jamrock burnout disapears. Martinaise is at scale with the game map (its all this little red thing at the tip of the two reference lines)

Elevation goes from sea level to 1300 meters (that would be in top Villabolos). I got those numbers after hours of not-succeeding-at-calculating-perspective-on-an-abstract-painting.

I should study more into delta river formation, i feel like them having so much volume is unnatural. Though if Harry was able to see across all of Couron up to revachol east, i guess there's not much terrain elevation here, meaning Jamrock (and probably Coal City) is more of an exception

For your information a pixel's side equals 54 meters. I know this because Precinct 41 is stated to be 18 kilometers south of Martinaise, puting Jamrock at around 2061 square kilometer (not counting old south), which is. Well you know, larger than Greater London, New York City, ....

What separates Jamrock for real life megapoles is that it's a roting sinkhole with no municipality so most of it is vacant, destroyed, or even straight up forests in the Pox.

And of course, here's a little map of Jamrock's subdistricts. With a little scale on the side, each rectangles representing 1 km.

The martinaise coast is goofy as hell here, don't mind whatever is happening east to it i don't like it a bit

Finally here's a little partial Mundi occidental map, based on the map seen in the noclip documentary. Its very unfinished and the only reason i did this is because i need to make a clear clear looking map to let my brain fathom worlds, the whimsical fantasy style of Kurvitz is wonderful but this is just a treat for my brain

I thought about contacting noclip to know if they could show more of the maps.... Im very shy, but i definitly should try.

Im very excited for this one. I have tons of Mundi maps in my sketchbooks, so having a trail of what Kurvitz imagined is just so refreshing. Now of course, it has visibly been retconned, from Advesperascit being in Vesper, to Ubi Sunt being East (the left could be south, but it would contradict Mesque's position as Eastern and Irmala's as Northern), Vredefort doesn't exist yet and is apparently called "Oranjenbaum" instead, Kedra is Ilmara's capital (Ilmara is never said to be a country anyways outside of this map) (I suspect Kedra and Altaa have later been swapped), etc...

What the hell is Pisantemum ? Its mentionned in SATA (as Pisanteum) ! What is Coldoba ?? Cristobal ??? Is Faust Maria's Mesque Capital ???? I love this so much.