Ormi Phengaria

Or, if you're still given worship as an ancestor while also reincarnating into others, you are mighty enough to be in multiple places at once, like the gods can. Possibly the case with most heroes. Might even meet and interact with yourself. I don't think that's so unimaginable.

I think the division which assigns Kajabor to natural evil and Wakboth to moral evil aligns with expectations all across Glorantha. Despite this, there is no formal (i.e. runic) evil in our received Gloranthan metaphysics, just a circular approximation, which sort of kills this twice-theodicy off in the cradle. We may now follow the dead to Arachne Solara. Kajabor in the Cosmic Compromise is intuitive: we can make peace with natural evil, accepting its existence if not its necessity. But moral evil is an empty mask. Wakboth is defined by his excess, his evil is cosmic redundancy. How could this ever be compromised with? I suggest: by prying off the mask, picking the scab, and seeing that it is the same wound underneath. Wakboth is natural in the world.

Kajabor is the Devil you know, and Wakboth the Devil you don't.

If one's imagined solution to interpersonal violence is to just mark up some violence as impersonally necessary, no matter its horror or existential meaninglessness, I don't think you can coherently call resistance to that idea a "perpetual pogrom." And that is the nicest thing I can say about that choice of words.

No. However, many do desire a cure to their existential sickness, and Illumination can provide that. Illumination is calming. It calms instinctive revulsion towards chaos, and the terror felt by its encroachment into the world, and provides the same calm to chaotic beings in the hatred and pain they feel towards existence and life. But this condition is not universal, just familiar. The latter, as follows from Illumination being neither Chaotic nor selfish inherently. However, giving a desperate and anxious person the unshakable knowledge that there is no fundamental difference between chaos and cosmos has a predictable, typical outcome. In the most benign case, they come to the belief that there is no difference between their personal existence or nonexistence, and lie down to rot. Rashoran calmed the gods as well, and most of them who received his teachings faced the Darkness and their demise in peace. Mortals seem to have a greater persistence for a time, but not usually for the better. Plenty of people get by without the Secret Knowledge. The persistence of chaos in any given worldview is not a failure, morally, intellectually, or otherwise. In fact, they too recognize that chaos is an inseparable part of the world in which they live, just in a different way, and one which is easy to malign as hypocritical, irrational, or malicious from a supposedly elevated vantage. But they haven't seen what we've seen. True. But the practical distinction between these, for Nysalor, is simply not there. It's not there for the god, who wasn't and isn't a god, whose meaning is Illumination and the Riddle. It's not there for the cult in whatever form it takes, because such organs are constituted by purpose. And it most certainly is not there for any given Illuminate by the mere fact of their Illumination.

Illuminates have nothing intrinsically stopping them from using their power to take from the world and give absolutely nothing back. They also have nothing intrinsically stopping them from using Chaos to this end. Demonstrably, when Illumination is widespread and unrestricted in the world, people who think and act like this amass great power. And Nysalor doesn't care. All he wants, if he could be said to want anything, is for you to ask questions about the universe and find their answers, a process which naturally leads to Illumination. If wrestling with those tough questions just makes you a better immortal cannibal tyrant? You know what, that's great for you, it's great to see someone working through their issues and really growing. We're all just here to find own meaning, man. That chain of causality is what makes Nysalor Chaotic, even though Illumination is not Chaotic in itself, and even though simply being selfish and destructive isn't Chaotic in itself. It is why the Gbaji Wars occurred, and why the Arkati view and appoint themselves as monitors of Illumination and the Other Side.

And to keep this from seeming too tangential, I'll give the thought that "Arkati Trickster Shaman" is, in many ways, an apparent triple redundancy. Any such transplants would likely just find themselves dissolving away into the whole by one means or another. Yet "Arkat" passed through these context-shifts while remaining "Arkat", even if that appears self-evidently contradicted to those who didn't follow him to the very end. His pledge is what protected him, and the pledge was set upon Mystery, though perhaps he did not at first comprehend this himself.

Seems like the story of Water and Chaos is murkier than it's made out to be! We might need to wade into the mud and work out the truth of this sticky situation ourselves. Really get our heads dirty. We may find ourselves mired, but w—[gurling noises as she is drowned in gorp by a Krjalki]

Arachne Solara is also more often 6 + 2 (two arms, six legs, or six arms, two legs) when interacted with. She's still eight--particularly when sideways--, but two Powers are distinguished from the rest, and my further guess is that their union produces . Consider Asrelia's association. (And when presented as both spider and woman in iconography, she has 10, 8+2. Lists of ten Powers have previously been made with no agreement as to what fills them. Sometimes it's Law and Chaos, sometimes Luck and Fate, sometimes it's other even less common runes. Whatever the choice, though, it probably represents the highest polarity in itself, the Twins.)

When Zzabur is watching with the Red Sands of Time nearby, magic lasts for exactly two and fifteen minutes each, for spirit and rune spells respectively, as he has defined it. When he's not, though, magic lasts exactly long enough to constitute a short or long scene in narrative terms. ☺️

Yes; I wasn't presenting a counterexample. It's nature as physis, particularly physis as opposed to the nomos of Time. All within the Web is Nature following its Fate.

Definitely. There is, however, a Goddess of Nature in the setting, and I should hope that colours how people think of it!

Rather than base-7, I suspect if the Lunars have made their own count, it might be base-27, since that could at least see calendrical use, and can go by the ancient "Twenty-Seven Carvers". Maybe some Carmanian numerology, too. Base-12 might be found in Pamaltela with the Hoolars offering a folkloric explanation.

To comment on the topic at large, I'm not entirely sure I like the straightforward shamanic analogy for humans-in-Aldrya. On the one hand, there are elements in this which are assuredly appropriate, as "forest consciousness" may naturally have its most direct route for creatures of flesh through the vastness of pixie pharmacopoeia. But on the other, the forest is precisely the place where the harder borders of ingrained human perspectives ought to be dissolving away into soft, gradual, and interpenetrating boundaries. The wood girds itself in ecotones, and intersperses groves and meadows, bare rock, streams, snags and fallen trees. Fauna give shape to canopy, understory, shrub, and herb layers, and are fed upon in turn by the dark life in the soil, which itself weaves between and around the roots of the trees, forming the medium of our wood wide web. Ought not elf-change be something similar? I think it's possible to reduce a principle from the form runes along the lines of "you are what you imbibe." Granted, it normally may manifest only on transgenerational timescales, but it makes a distinct sort of sense to me that the Aldryami could accelerate the process to somewhere between your distant descendants and your quite immediate and calamitous rebirth. Maybe some form of death is still a necessity; humans do usually only become green in advanced stages of decomposition! But the inclusion of "Maker modalities" (as @scott-martinphrased it) in this ritual initiation is certainly strange, even if it does make me start giggling about "machine elves."

Sometimes it can be. I worried about including the singular line you quoted for all of the reasons I outlined in the rest of the post; you are substituting your own understanding of the distinction when I speak of it. Your read of magic in Glorantha is suffering from the same problem. It is not taking the magic out and putting it back in. It does not share the necessity of a divide where people "really did this" and were declared "lunatics" on the one side, and the Great Hallucination/Metaphor/Symbolism/Whatever on the other side. It is always exactly as literal, actual, and real as it needs to be for its participants to experience it and wield it. The wonderful opportunity Glorantha gifts to us is instead the opportunity to see and experience these other perspectives with far greater ease. If you'd like, you could imagine roleplaying to be its own kind of altered state.

Disclaimer: I've only skimmed through the third page of this thread, and my own spirituality is predominantly "shamanic" (as katulunan or wuyu/very red daojiao). Speaking of belief in these terms, where you state what it is you see as an outsider as the reality or actuality, and the received explanation being a layer of meaning-making laid atop the reality as something less essential, is the point where you will run into problems and potential controversy. To the practitioners, they are often just as literal and actual-- with outside eyes and a willingness to accept that your senses may not be absolute, it would be as though you are standing in another world where you do not and cannot witness these things occurring. And, yes, I would agree that you are, do not, and cannot. We assign different meanings to the same concepts, even if we share the words, to the point where what I am describing may be ineffable to you without one of us taking the effort to translate what is untranslatable and mix our worlds together. With these initiations, the flesh, the inert matter, is not what is being spoken of. What is being spoken of is the living substance, the thing which is the deeper or higher reality, which is more true. This is absolutely not to say that these two categories are unrelated-- things are done to and with bodies which even you may perceive, and which may frighten, shock and/or disgust you. And it would not surprise you to learn that there have been many misunderstandings in this, to be grossly charitable, over the past several centuries.

I don't know if it's unexpected. Their Rune Lords are literally called Leaders, and rather than a CHA requirement, get the status by demonstrating any leadership in raids and battle at all (alongside the skill requirements.)

Worth noting that CHA in RQG is neither appearance nor "personal allure", but strength of personality. CHA matters to magic not as potential for connection (really, that would be POW), but as the ability to continue to distinguish yourself from the abstract or immaterial forces of personality, that is the gods and spirits, which you are interacting with. For this reason it also applies to distinguishing yourself from other mortal people, i.e. through leadership.

You know. You're right. The Bat really isn't chaotic!

Sometimes, destruction is good! Sometimes, you just have to make yourself a little breathing room between heaven and earth.

As a "religious Daoist" in my beliefs first and foremost, much of the more accessible material on illumination, Vithelan enlightenment, draconic consciousness, etc. did come across that way to me– initially. Equating the Void with Chaos maps pretty well to equating weiwuwei with acceptance of evil. But the presented conflicts and perspectives relating to those things are not what they might first seem, and now I can't help but read them as being exceedingly mischievous.

Well, he is half-fish!

The primordialism is in the drive toward oblivion, and that also remains the source of its creative potential, which I have mentioned before in this thread. Without the Chaosium, all would be unchanging grey stasis, and yet generation from this state is still its destruction, starting from the separation of unity into duality. With regard to the Other, that was my very conscious choice. Yelm is Absolute, and only at his nadir when the entire world has died and joined him in Hell—the Absolute again—does he confront his Other and integrate it. He does this by the means of Illumination. These concepts don't diverge. I'm trying to be explicit in suggesting that it is not primarily about hatred, bigotry, or social marginalization. These are second-order phenomena. What matters is the extent to which the Orlanthi refuse to approach these things as anything other than individual, inexplicable, and utterly unrelated evil. The extent is total. Rape isn't to be understood as an enduring facet of the patriarchal violence of a warrior culture, but is first and foremost something to be blamed on women who stand outside of the honour-ethos. If that is untenable, then the motivations of the perpetrators of this violence are to be erased by rendering them simply insane. This is a pattern which should stand out as intimately familiar, in my opinion. They manifest themselves as Ogres after initiation. Ogres are also much, much more than cannibals. The Red Cow Saga would seem to suggest that they are Ragnaglari, and hold to a rapine view of the entire world, including other Ogres, and most definitely the community and culture in which they are born and raised. This is, again, something latent and unexamined in the Orlanthi warrior culture. It's what happens when outwardly directed violent abuse and dispossession comes home. After cutting past all of the social ritual, when strength remains the ultimate justification, you will find the Ragnaglar impulse. That is, to me, quite different from the way the Cannibal Cult seems to use the Survival Covenant for its way of life and magic. They are deeply disconcerting to other Praxians, who don't pretend to completely understand them, but like the Morokanth, they are integrated. Ah. I feel it's important to mention here that the existence of the Other is not reducible to the process of Othering. The condition is usually co-constitutive; Chaos is not particularly suggestive of subaltern nativity. And that may ease some of this Lunar difficulty; the Way seeks to integrate the Other while also keeping it Other. Self and Other exist both as opposites and as a unity within the Ultimate. That, to me, is a nearly perfect encapsulation of Lunar mysticism. It would seem to me that to make the Way selective in the suggested manner, to turn We Are All Us into the conviction that the Other does not or should not exist, would be to flatten it into a worse caricature than even the one where it's straight-forwardly evil and antagonistic.

To me, they're different manifestations of the same underlying phenomenon, which is conflict as understood through a perspectivist lens (perspectivism being what I tend to use most frequently in my critical readings of the text). It's that deep, unconscious, and complete rejection of the Other which renders something into being Chaotic. And so far, this holds to consistency, as much I can tell. You know what? Sure! If we switch gears into a more esoteric, Tantric mode, that's a perfectly acceptable interpretation, but it's no surprise that it's torturous. More exoterically, the Lunar Way conceives of its project in terms of enabling the many different parts of the cosmos to adhere into a harmonious whole, bringing a final end to the Gods War. The main point of contention is that it believes Chaos to be one of those parts, rather than the thing preventing harmony in the first place. In practice, though, they follow a pretty stark dichotomy: Chaos should be shunned or even still eradicated in the same manner of the worst storm bully if it rejects the Way or the Empire, respectively. Chaos becomes acceptable when it becomes Sevened, or under the control of the Sevened. No longer oblivion for its own sake, but oblivion as a tool to manifest the Lunar cosmos. The Way does not see oblivion as being the fundamental nature of Chaos, because the fundamental nature of anything which exists is the unity of We Are All Us. Is that unchallenging? Not in my experience.

The text says a lot of things which are plainly contradictory and inconsistent. At first, I took this to be a demonstration of interpretive freedom, or, as I read you here, a sign of papering over thematic incoherence. I started taking Glorantha more seriously when I noticed that these many inconsistencies were inconsistent in a consistent manner, both internally to sources and comparatively between them. The perspective and voice of Chaos in the text is vanishingly rare outside of Lunar writings. Broos are the closet thing, and we're still stuck reading between the lines of etic accounts. Everyone is pointing at and talking about something called Chaos, but where we look where the lines cross, there's nothing there. The only constant is that they are pointing away from themselves and their worlds and norms. Chaos is not limited to subjective social tensions, even if at the very least this could be reasonably argued to link Broos, Ogres, and Huan-To, and certainly cults like Gark, Ikadz, Krjalk, Ompalam, and Thanatar. How about the Devil's Marsh? Waha transforms the River into a carrier of spiritual pollution, and rejects her as shameful. The Riverfolk reject Waha, and reject his Canal. The Canal tries to reject herself by burying under the Earth, only for the Earth to reject her a final time. She surfaces to become the Marsh. Supposedly, the Canal disintegrates the Devil, but the Chaos this creates is an inexorable part of Waha's cult, as you mentioned. What would happen if it were to succeed? And why does the water so strongly resist flowing under the Block? The waters of the world were the very first to sacrifice themselves in the fight against Chaos. There is unresolved and unspoken conflict at the center of this mystery even as it spawns dragonsnails and gorp. It means healing that cosmic wound, of course. Turning Chaos into not-oblivion; integrating it into the world. Whether the Way can succeed at that while the Empire wields oblivion as its favoured weapon remains to be seen, though it does have powerful evidence in its favour!