The Elder Scrolls does not offer a neutral cosmology. Every major creation account is written from a partisan position that serves the interests of the culture producing it.
Start with The Monomyth. It compiles Altmeri, Yokudan/Redguard, Cyrodilic versions of the same events, plus general/mythic framing such as the Psijic account, and each version quietly elevates its own pantheon while diminishing the others. The Altmer text frames Lorkhan as a trickster who shattered eternal unity. The Redguard version recasts him as Sep, a hungry helper/trickster figure who creates the mortal world from old skins and traps spirits; Ruptga destroys him. Neither is presented as the baseline truth; both are left standing as competing claims.
The same pattern appears inside single cultures. The 36 Lessons of Vivec are not scripture in the neutral sense. They are Vivec's own retelling of his rise, written after the Tribunal seized divine power from the Heart of Lorkhan. The Dissident Priests' texts, preserved in sources like Progress of Truth, Nerevar at Red Mountain, and related Nerevarine materials, directly contradict the official Temple line on the same events. The Tribunal/Vivec were direct participants in the events around Nerevar while the later Dissident Priests preserved alternative traditions; they produced incompatible records because each had power to protect.
Imperial sources follow the rule. Varieties of Faith, an Imperial comparative text by Brother Mikhael Karkuxor, records regional/cultural variants of deities. These are not errors. They are the expected output of institutions that need their version of history to prevail.
Even sources that claim higher objectivity still carry fingerprints. The Arcturian Heresy presents an alternative account of Tiber Septim's apotheosis that undercuts the official legend. It survives because it was never fully suppressed, not because the Empire endorsed it. The game never hands the player a corrected, final version.
This design choice forces a particular kind of reading. A player who treats any single book as settled fact will misread later events that depend on those contradictions. The lore rewards treating every text as advocacy first and record second.
The pattern holds across eras and writers. When a new source appears, the useful question is not whether it is true, but which faction needed it to be true at the time it was written.
How do you decide which sources to weight when every major account serves an agenda? Do you apply the same standard to the Psijics' descriptions of the Dawn Era that you apply to the Tribunal's histories?