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!
The Narzissenkreuz World Quest series was incredible. We met interesting characters, got caught up in an ongoing story from Fontaine's past, learned how it links up with the major events happening in Fontaine's present and of course what's near and dear to my heart, we got so much lore.
Something I think people have been latching onto is Rene's Root Cycle theory. I've been seeing everything from "we're journeying backwards to the cycles and Snezhnaya is Hyperboreas" to how "these cycles are Teyvat's samsaras that Nahida brought up and we're currently on the baptism cycle." Personally if I'd subscribe to any of them I'm most inclined to agree with the samsaras though there might be more to consider that just Rene's theory.
To start let's pick the one Rene says we're on: Khraun-Arya.
Khraun might be the Persian Khorasan meaning rise, specifically a sunrise. This may have come from the Ancient Greek khora which means origin. (we can relate origin to sunrise by considering China naming Japan "the land of the rising sun" as translated into English but in its original Chinese it means the sun's origin 日本)
Arya or Aryan is much simpler. It's Persian for people. Actually the word would mean "noble" in its original Indo-Iranian form but Persia used it to mean themselves. And as it relates to Narzissenkreuz, Alain Guillotine's name also means Aryan in French.
Taken together Khraun-Arya might mean the Rise of Humanity in context of this being their origin point to nobility, their emancipation from the gods. Combining this with Rene's notes about his Ipsissimus Tower and what his research was based on this term was meant to apply to Khaenri'ah and their own quest to surpass the gods as the nation built purely by humans, the pride of humankind. And then of course since he was living in the post-Cataclysm period and claimed it to only be the first half of the Khraun-Arya samsara it's likely he intended for Fontaine, his Fontaine to be the conclusion: the successful freedom of humanity from the gods.
Now of course Rene was pure bonkers. I mean if the World Quest series itself didn't clue us in that the guy was off his rocker we can just look at where miHoYo got this idea from. It's called Theosophy and it makes for some very interesting reading.
The part they gave to Rene actually shows us why his research didn't work and instead he turned himself into sludge. See there aren't actually just four root cycles. There are seven. Seven is a really common theme in Genshin and while it's also really common in religions worldwide I don't think it's just coincidence that miHoYo happened to taken inspiration from yet another seven concept. In these real world cycles Remuria isn't given any kind of distinction. Actually Rene didn't even lump it together with the right cycle. Remuria or Lemuria as it's inspired by comes before Natlantean or actually Atlantean and is just characterized by being destroyed through flooding caused by consecutive volcanic eruptions. The only notable thing about this period is that it led to the Atlantean one and sometimes these two get conflated because of that. It's the Atlantean cycle where some of the most ancient and prominent races of humanity arose, you know like Atlantis.
I'd actually say that the Atlantean cycle would be a shoe-in for Teyvat's pre-Cataclysm Seven Nations with Khaenri'ah in the role of Atlantis itself, a place of pride and decadence that ultimately sank into the abyss through the people's use of black magic. I mean, supposedly they used this magic to create hybrid creatures and that sounds just like Khemia and the Abyss Order.
But if we do take the real world Theosophy into account I think Rene might have been onto something. Before Hyperboreas there's actually another cycle called Polaris and that featured the creation of Mt. Meru which is the Hindu Sumeru. The lore behind this links up with Genshin's Phanes using the four shades to create the Firmament. So if that's the case we could say Polaris is the original state of Teyvat before the First Descender and then it establishes the Firmament which leads to Hyperboreas and the story continues into the Prayers Artifact series. This was a period where the inhospitable environment was remade to accommodate humanity as Phanes did it for "our" sake. But then people got greedy so they had to be punished like Remus and his Remuria which sank into the sea. After that Fontaine was led by Egeria and she was one of the original Seven. Knowing that Remuria came after Gurabad it wouldn't be surprising if the current Seven Nations were all established around this time and so we leave the Remurian/Lemurian cycle for the Natlantean/Atlantean one. Then just like Atlantis, Khaenri'ah also fell and that's the Cataclysm which leads us to Khraun-Arya the Rise of Humanity.
But if we're going with this idea I'd say Rene needed to do even more homework because we're not in Khraun-Arya now either. In the sixth root cycle Theosophy proposes that humanity will become psychic. Now I'm pretty sure they were going for the conventional definition of psychic but we're Genshin players and psychic strikes a chord in Gnosticism. The psychics are one of three levels of human the other two being hylics and pneumatics. The psychics would essentially be allogenes or at least those with the potential to become allogenes. This sixth cycle will also feature one of the "masters" physically incarnating to pave the way for the rest of humanity to follow it into the new root cycle.
Side Note: Of course that new era will be under a single world government led by the reincarnation of Julius Caesar and have intense selective breeding centered around the breakaway capital of California. Did I mention how bonkers this stuff is?
Anyway what comes next is that final seventh cycle where humanity becomes wholly spiritual beings. That would be the pneumatics in Gnosticism who will have ascended back to the true god free from the false god of the Demiurge. That's actually the endgame I have been theorizing too. And it could even align with a more recent theory of mine. Is this what miHoYo's going for? I have no idea but it's interesting right? Let's see what happens.
Side Note: O yeah and btw after all of that we're supposed to move to Mercury, you know because humanity originally came from Mars.... Yeah. Theosophy. I guess we'll see if the Part 2 girls over in Honkai Impact will find out about this ancestry of ours lol
tl;dr Long story short. Rene is a nut. Theosophy is pretty wild too. But there might be something to the seven cycles of real world Theosophy with relation to Genshin's story.
Topic originally created on January 18th, 2024.