Ormi Phengaria

The atheists of God Forgot are kind of a special case even in the sometimes foreign Gloranthan usage of that term. Postmisotheism? God was real, he lived among us, and he was an unreliable fool who got our hopes up and then dashed them against the rocks again and again. A tragic kind of Trickster, maybe. This is also a population primed and ready to learn from those mistakes and do it better, if they ever discovered or were given the knowledge and power to do so.

With the Three Curious Spirits, we can substitute Subere, Xentha, and Dehore for Xiola Umbar, Argan Argar, and Zorak Zoran respectively. Subere was untouched by light but still shaped by its presence, Dehore broke apart into the infinite shades, and Xentha was the veil around the godling.

A third option: the dark waters reflect the light of below. But this is beyond just the suggestion of Annilla, it is entry into her hidden sky, and few would ever speak of it.

Excellent example. Chaos in this analogy is not the glass, but the empty space the water fills. Regarding the elemental progression, the specifics do change quite frequently depending on where we start and end. The Dara Happan universe of Plentonius begins from Fire (of course), the Pelandan from a Fire-and-Water dualism, and even in the ancient West we find devolution into Fire as energy and Earth as matter, with Air and Water being the mixed states. And there are many others. But Water from Darkness has made the best case for a First Beginning, seen only from what is unseen, unknowable and unreachable. For the idealists, this is the natural environment to situate the prima materia.

Oftentimes it feels like we've lost the bead in discussions about Chaos, constantly drawn back into a confrontation with mysticisms. The very great majority of Gloranthans do not believe the world was made from Chaos. They also are not wrong to think this even if their stream of belief doesn't account for its gaps. The Mythical Synthesis includes in its creation story the concept of the Void, and even sometimes prioritizes it as the Zero, but even this isn't Chaos as either its believers or others understand it. Mystics just tend towards a different view of Chaos than the other three streams, and this becomes conflated. Chaos rather holds cosmological prominence in two other groupings, which were never fit into the Mythical Synthesis: Chaotic cults themselves, who demand eternal oblivion to the world in one way or another, and the Draconic Creation Myth, which begins "First was Chaos." In this story, Chaos is the first thing that was. But do not be misled: Chaos is not the Cosmic Dragon, which is beyond both existence and non-existence. Chaos, that which is not the Cosmic Dragon, was first. I also feel like mentioning some of the First Rune mythemes. Five of the Powers (not Stasis, Illusion, or Life, meaningfully) are placed in opposition to Chaos as the very first act of creation. But the instinct to reduce further and see Chaos as being the progenitor of these Runes is mistaken. At most, they are mutually generative. Chaos is what the World Bird escaped from; the World Bird is that which escaped from Chaos. And so on. Consider also that the Powers are already formed in natural oppositions.

If Water is all of the possibilities of the universe without Darkness, but came from Darkness, we can infer that it's the combination of Water and Darkness which is that primordial, undifferentiated state of everything and nothing.

Yet it's the Chaosium which keeps the world from being endless, unchanging grey monotony. And Darkness could only be born through its separation from Water. Which reminds me: Some Ancient Commentaries on Magic and Chaos

He'll also happily Riddle you on Plato, so I'd say it checks out.

The moon is considered to be at Half at all times within the Glowline. It's within the Silver Shadow (and Glowspots) where the phase is always considered as Full. The intersection of magical geography and Time has always carried meaning. I would say the whole bit about Wildday being either the universal or the historical day of transformation is inferring from flawed, if understandable, premises. It has probably also been emphasized to clear the Wolfbrother allies of Sartar of anything more than a distant association to the Red Moon. My suspicion is that the old transformation day for the Nysaloran Telmori was still Freezeday; in Dorastor and Aggar, it would be Godday.

The relationship here is probably similar to the rule which caps all sorcery to a Read/Write skill in the CRB. Possibly Open Seas uses another skill, too.

Yet Wolf Hide and Wolfrunning cannot be cast on Waterday or Clayday. Those are the Dying and Black Moon phases in Dragon Pass, and seem to be rather arbitrary choices anywhere else. So there's a bit more to the Moon mystery than first appears.

It's been suggested recently: "There are hundreds of sorcery spells. Some are logically arranged together as an organized philosophy, while others might be tied in deeply with an understanding of martial arts and emphasize harmony between body, mind, and cosmos. Some spells are widely known and are self-sufficient like Dormal’s Open Seas spell. Others require significant theoretical underpinnings to understand and cast." Note that in Revealed Mythologies, both Sivoli and Kamboli are considered to be Venforn as well as his students. The relationship here is likely more abstract than restriction to a single magical paradigm— Ven Forn was the Immense Master because his teaching encompassed everything. What I see this implying is that his ways may resemble shamanic powers, but split down the middle. Sivoli took the taboos/austerities, and might've used the power this granted him in some sorcerous fashion. Kamboli's way could be interpreted as shamanic abilities without the taboos, and perhaps circumventing the extremes of self-sacrifice (i.e, in RQG, characteristic point loss.) The primary risk noted is sliding into antigod practices. Both of them, by their methods, meet ends which are flawed from a more traditional shamanic perspective. Sivoli tries to separate himself from the world in a manner similar to Refutation, but in the end loses himself all at once to the Mother of Erdires. Kamboli does not integrate the world into himself, but dissolves into the world unsatisfied with his life.

Two interpretations: 1. Argrath just successfully performed the LBQ and the necessary instrument for the return of the Grand Order ended up being Sheng Seleris. There are a lot of reasons to believe this is the case, starting from the very first human LBQ bringing back Arkat. However, it seems evident that Sheng did not restore the Grand Order, and just made the Empire consecutively worse, it's probably safe to say. And there is one other very good reason to believe it isn't the case... 2. ...which is that it's not clear Argrath was even seeking the Grand Order at all. His goal is the destruction of the Lunar Empire and the Red Moon, which he swore by the Styx to do. Since the LBQ can't just accomplish this, one wonders why he performed it to begin with. It's possible Sheng's hell was only reachable by Ranging from this point, or that he was released as a consequence of Argrath's actions independently of his motivations. It's also known that Argrath prefers to keep gods in his debt.

The birth rate in any society isn't just a socially immutable constant, but something which changes as people take account of the conditions around themselves and how their family will survive and hopefully prosper. It appears exceptionally rare for even the most devastatingly high-mortality famines to have major, direct impacts on even short- to medium-term demographics for this reason. The young and the elderly disproportionately die, but birth rates immediately spike following famines, perhaps as there is less demand for food but roughly the same level of productivity. So the Great Winter is not out of the ordinary in that consideration.

Hate does kill everything, I'm told.

Perhaps!

My guess/interpretation is that the Elmali of the Dawn did have limited fire magic, but none of it from the god himself. Rather, it would have come from associate cults like the Lowfires and others since lost, with the early Elmal cult not knowing any prohibition on fire magic per se. I don't believe they would have gotten any extra magic from worshipping the Sun alongside the Yellow Planet, because they were identified as the same entity. That identification shaped the divine relationships they saw, but it also cut them off from a deeper understanding of . And certainly they were not getting Sunspear from Yelm. How things evolved from there has an obvious dimension and a more obscure one. The obvious history is that the Elmali accepted Yelm as the Sun and Elmal as Lightfore, and that there were Lightfore mysteries they didn't know. The obscure history is in the later revelation of Daysenerus by Nysalor at the Battle of Night and Day. This deity is known to be Yelmalio, but his appearance implies that he was also something new, and he is implied in the Fortunate Succession to be an Amalgam Deity. I interpret him as a version of Yelmalio with Illuminated rune masters and a vast array of often contradictory cult associations.

Most of the gods calmed by Rashoran did take the Bartleby conclusion. Of course, by making peace with oblivion in such a way, it hardly follows that you've also made peace with the world and your own existence within it. That mystery remains, even if painful to acknowledge and so typically ignored. But why postpone fate? The placid ones thought "the cosmos is senseless suffering moving towards inevitable doom," and so allowed themselves to dissolve. One might instead think "the world is meaningless and full of suffering, but it's peppered with ephemeral pleasure, and I like that better than the thought of non-existence." Maybe this is extended in more sophisticated ways as well. But no matter the stipulations, it isn't a justification for inaction, it's deflecting from an earnest appraisal between oblivion and your life. It's a wound you will continually pick at until it festers. Perhaps as a Hate (Life) passion. In RuneQuest. (I'm talking about RuneQuest.)

"Mystery cults" themselves were likely not distinguishable from the broader milieu of belief and practice they were situated in; the concept itself is a reconstruction which was only even noticed because of its misalignment with what was known about public cult practices (the presumed mainstream "Hellenistic religion"). The earlier form of the concept emphasized their supposed foreignness as imported Asiatic religions as the reason for the observed separation, but they have since been shown to be mostly home-grown. The later form (though there is overlap between both) emphasizes the private, personal, and initiatory nature of these cults pretty much solely as an explication of Christianity's evangelizing success in the Roman Empire after the third century. It's been an long exercise in affirming the consequent. I also question how coherent the idea of "psychological identification" with the divine actually is. When armies clash against one another, are they identifying with Ares, or is that just what Ares is? A soldier loots and destroys a home: is Ares in him, or the action, or the consequences? Is Ares post-hoc? It's a simple matter to say that someone given to wanton destruction and with a talent in violence is like Ares. I think that when we imagine a firm line being drawn between divinity and the world and its actors, we lead ourselves away from understanding the experience of someone who would name these powers as they saw them: War, Desire, Night, Sky, Earth, and so on. Other counterexamples abound more further afield than the ancient Mediterranean. Just off of the top of my head, I know of tantric deity yoga, the concept of avatar (in the verbal meaning of descent rather than the acquired meaning of incarnation) and bhakti practices, daoist internal meditations into one's own "godscapes" and external spiritual journeys to immortals, and ruist saintly venerations. All of these involve emulation of divine power if not outright identification with it, often without much effort spent making that distinction.

If it helps you to understand Glorantha as "what if mythology was real", I think that's great. Your character can literally shoot lightning from their fingertips, because that is what's written down in the pages of the rulebook. That's the buy-in and the vehicle for you to enjoy yourself. The perception of there being great differences between ancient Mediterranean "polytheisms" and Gloranthan cults doesn't really hold up, though. I think the furthest you can push that claim is that Gloranthan cults tend to more strongly feature elements of "mystery religion" than the worldviews and practices of antiquity. But mystery practice was nonetheless pervasive in the Aegean; it might have touched everything in one way or another. It wasn't just Eleusis and Orphics and Mithraeums. It was also Curetes and Dactyls, and the Temple of Saturn, and Gallae, and the rock drawings in Valcamonica. Initiation and other such liminal rites were also nearly universally practiced across the Earth until only up to about the past century or so with no great breaks in the continuity of that practice. I also haven't seen much fretting about the afterlife in Gloranthan material. They just acknowledge that it's there. Most groups seem to have a cheerier interpretation than the eastern Mediterranean underworld ("life continues on the same, except a bit worse in every way"). But it's also not hard to find great diversity even in that, for example about a thousand kilometers to the south of Hellas, where death was kind of a big deal. As far as moral authority goes, this is fairly separated from the question of cult. The exception is the tip of the iceberg which is unfortunately grossly over-represented in the history and archaeological insight available to us, being public cult. When the divine is displeased, that displeasure manifests itself to the transgressor. When a polity transgresses against the divine, the polity suffers for it, especially if they had bargained not to do so. But the desires of the divine aren't an absolute measure of right or wrong, and they frequently conflict with human wishes and livelihoods. So this too was ultimately transactional, most of the time. Propitiatory. Covenanted. Tee-hee! It's a rare miracle these days, but people can learn and acknowledge when their beliefs are wrong. They can change their beliefs to accommodate other encounters and revelations, too. And there's plenty of room for distortion and deception in the divine for either world: for example, how we Anglophones et al continue to talk and think about these things with the vocabulary and latent assumptions of Latin Christianity, even if we believe ourselves divorced from it.

I'm gonna go with option 3. Even if nothing else here stands (following the assertion that Gloranthans routinely murder their family members over game mechanics), this is all still very amusing.

Further observations mostly pulling from Safelster in the First Age: Vustr was the youngest son of Eneral, and Vustria was adjacent to the pass into Dorastor. Vustr sides with Erulat the Storm in the Battle of Battles. During the Darkness, all of the people of Eneral seem to lose their intermediate lineages. The Vustri pantheon at the Dawn features Eneral and his wife Doska, and the hero-queen Nusa who led them into the forest to survive the Darkness, but not Vustr. Their mythology is said to be already very close to the Theyalan stories in distinction to the other Enerali, particularly in the competition of Ehilm and Erulat over the Green Lady, which may imply a connection to Saird. Interestingly, while the Enerali are stated to already be horse-riders at the Dawn, they limit this skill to hunting, and use their ponies to fight only from chariots until they encounter Seshnegi cavalry.

Given Hippogriff's flight (and the continued existence of Hippogriffs through Time!), we could expect a much wider dispersion of her descendants than just Nivorah. There's the Enerali, mostly, which is the lead-in to this mystery. If we take Anaxial's Roster to still have some truth in it, then the earliest horses are the eki of the Shan Shan and Mislari foothills. Further down, we have unicorns, which may not be originally horse-like; they are all male, and the Roster states they reproduce with horses and deer, which has changed them from what they once were. Deeper still, centaurs. While the other people around Beast Valley say that it is directly a product of EWF, there's a strong intuition that's not the whole story. Beastmen seem to have a different relationship to Time. The power of centaurs in Beast Valley, their relationship to Arachne Solara, and Ironhoof's transformation of the Pain Centaurs into the Grazers presumably all have real meaning. I am drawn to a possible etymological explication of "centuar", here: bull-wounder. Reclaiming sky lordship from the despoiler-beast? There are stories here, but the beastfolk can scantly tell them; they are only lived. We can live them too... waiting in the web at the Wild Temple. Riding is associated with Hyalor, Yamsur, and Praxians. I know that dragonewts also have something of a riding tradition, but grant me the mercy of excluding them for now. When "Yamsur loses his mount", the relationship between beast and man entered into disarray, and this plays out differently across the continent. In Prax and Dragon Pass, we can feel out the scars of that conflict, see it in the icons of Ragnaglar and Wakboth. The Pelorian and Pentan horse peoples made relationships between themselves and their beasts different to the one between Waha and Eiritha. Maybe those relationships were less complete. But some retained the more direct ancestral connection. Back to the Enerali. Like the Pure Horse Tribe, they seem to have kept (or at least rediscovered) a strong ancestral connection to the Sun Horse, to the extent that the later Galanini chieftains were said to be able to become horses. To me, this implies a horse culture of greater antiquity than the Hyalorings. It's also obvious that this culture had transformed a great deal between the Gods War and the Dawn Age. It wouldn't surprise me if a western branch of Hyalorings contacted this older culture and was absorbed into it so thoroughly that even Hyalor's separate existence had vanished by the Dawn, nonetheless leaving them the secret of riding.

It does represent the humanoid shape. That's not everything that it means, but that's what the rune itself, the symbol, shows. Just like the beast rune representing the armour plate over the eye of a dragon, or the death rune representing a sword. The same description of the man rune this is being pulled from goes into the different meanings ascribed to it.

IFWW is a misleading phrase, eliding the middle, which is "I lost utterly". In the course of "I Fought", your personal power proves to be useless, your being is stripped away, you dissolve into Chaos. But something eternal still remains, and it's that thing which carries onto "We Won". For Heortling/Orlanthi masculine initiations, this is the Star Heart, which I think is particularly notable for connecting these two events together. Yelmalio fights, bleeds out his heat and light, and becomes indistinct, yet something remains: the imperishable truth of light, still there beyond the darkness. "We" is really the whole world, which depends on the light for its continued existence and life. Even Uz.