In the Tombs of Atuan, Arha spends over a decade serving as high priestess in the dark temples of the Nameless Ones. The Tao Te Ching mentions names and nameless occasionally, and usually nameless is seen as the ideal. Names are human constructions, but they are not true or eternal. “The name you can say isn’t the real name. Heaven and earth begin in the unnamed: name’s the mother of the ten thousand things.”
So if namelessness, like emptiness and unwanting, is an ideal to be striven for, why is the temple of the Nameless Ones so vilified in the Tombs of Atuan? The only answer I can think of right now is that the people inside it, not the idea, were the real culprits. They were arrogant, sadistic, and power-hungry. And they weren’t really serving the Nameless Ones at all – they answered to the God-Kings (I think, I’m going to need to reread the book to make sure). So maybe it’s just an example of an ideal gone awry in human hands.
Naming isn’t mentioned as much some other ideas in the Tao, like nature and the wise soul. But names have a huge role in the Earthsea trilogy, and I’d kind of like to explore how names and namelessness play out.
