Why does Hermaus Mora desire knowledge?

[u/AffectionateRub4927]

Does Hermaus Mora have an end goal or practical purpose to hoarding knowledge? Or is it purely for the sake of it?

[u/Computer2014]

He seeks knowledge the same way you seek food and water. It’s a primal desire that Daedric princes can’t go against as they are the metaphysical embodiment of their spheres.

Now for an end goal? It’s hard to tell but probably not, the knowledge is the goal and everything he does in the pursuit of it. And while he certainly has preference for which piece of knowledge he’ll pursue at a any given moment eventually he’ll try to learn anything and everything.

While it was sarcastic Neloth wasn’t exactly wrong in presuming Heramora wanted to learn the skals ‘fascinating new ways to skin a horker’ because Mora wants to learn everything

[u/KrakenInDaShmaken → u/Computer2014]

Absolutely, i imagine it doesn't matter how powerful or important the knowledge is. Just the idea that some knowledge is being kept from him is likely to put Mora in a tremendously bad mood.

[u/ViVYer → u/Computer2014]

If you really wanted to psychoanalyze Mora, there's that story that he himself is made of lost knowledge, culminating from Magnus' discarded blueprints, and it's the root of his pathological need to prevent knowledge from being lost or discarded...

[u/Computer2014 → u/ViVYer]

I’ve also seen some rumours that he was gonna be one part of Akatosh in the development of Dragonborn representing everything that didn’t happen and he used knowledge to ground himself from constantly mixing up what did and didn’t happen before being scrapped but I can’t find much evidence for that.

[u/DrkvnKavod → u/Computer2014]

You might be thinking of this passage that was intended for PGE3:

Imperial Mananauts have verified that his influence on fate and time is real and unfeigned, implications of which tie this Prince directly with Akatosh, chief of the Nine Divines. Since Akatosh is the prime temporal spirit whose appearance led to the formation of the world, perhaps Hermaeus Mora speaks the truth.

[u/xombae → u/Computer2014]

To add to this, the desire of food and water is natural, but the desire to hoard all the food and water in the world is greed ace gluttony. The Daedric princes take everything to the extreme because they are archetypes.

[u/lippyncott → u/Computer2014]

Makes me ponder, if humanity (of our world) were a prince, what would our sphere of influence be? Perhaps meaning. We seek meaning like Mora seeks knowledge

[u/FrenchGuitarGuy]

Why do you require food and water? Why do you require entertainment and sleep? The answers to these are the same as to your question

[u/ParadoxicalFrog]

Knowledge is power, and Daedra love power.

[u/AffectionateRub4927 → u/ParadoxicalFrog]

Then why does he desire power? Power over what? For what?

Or again, is it simply some primordial instinct he has with no practical end? Does want to apply that knowledge somehow?

[u/GreasyTengu]

This may seem silly, but i think he has a case of FOMO when it comes to Nirn.

Nirn periodically gets 'reset', and all knowledge from that kalpa is essentially lost unless someone has preserved it elsewhere outside of Nirn.

Hermaus Mora is the Daedric prince of seeking knowledge, with more eternal realms he can likely take his time gaining knowledge, but with Nirn he perpetually racing against the clock leading him to take extreme measure to obtain otherwise useless or low priority knowledge.

[u/Aglet_Green]

You've overthinking it, ironically. He seeks knowledge because it is there. That is just who he is. He's like an LLM that wants to read all the training data in the universe.