mfbrandi

Or we naturalise death and disease and we wipe away the attitude that they are intrusions from “outside” that no morally upstanding person could compromise with. There is a strain in Gloranthan religion that wants to turn every Kajabor into a Wakboth and won’t be happy with anything of the mundane world unless it can be painted with the brush of the gods. What needs to be cleansed, the world or the way we are determined to see it? The progressive disenchantment of the world from Age to Age would seem to be a given, the fight is over whether this is a good thing. (And as the same metaphor can be used to different ends, some of the fights will be pointless. 😉 )

Perhaps it is so expensive because so few sets are sold. To wear the armour is to be marked for death, so demand is naturally low, but then the clients will insist on re-using the same set for generations. Charge the maximum possible price, as you may never get another sale. (Main qualification for being a rune lord is to be the same size as the last guy.) Perhaps iron armour needs a “security feature” — it will self-destruct on the death of the owner “to prevent it falling into enemy hands”. New ritual for becoming a rune lord: have your iron armour “imprinted” on you, so that it becomes a pile of rust on your death. It is good for economic growth.

And that is what makes it scary. The only fair lottery is the one where the humans always win. I had to bury the goddess in order to save her. The butcher shows concern for the butchered. They need to invent an unheimlich manoeuvre. BB assures me a little alienation is good for me. (And don’t worry: here in the interzone, we have plenty.)

Well, Argrath is a bit like the Devil: he comes in ≥ two versions giving ≥ three flavours. Is he Kajabor or Wakboth? How do we feel about Kajabor? (Wakboth is set up so as to prevent that question being asked in polite society.) What was it Bazarov said, “at the present time, negation is the most useful action”? Well, we can (I guess) introject Wakboth and carry him around with us, but you cannot swallow Kajabor, you can only let Kajabor swallow you. Kajabor cannot introject anything as the Hollow K is the perfect memory hole — poof! it is gone. Kajabor was in the end able to master self-swallowing, so now no one can talk about him/her/it. I miss the empty fellow. It is like I have this … void inside. 😉 Defining the Devil as evil is a cheap trick. Defining the Devil in non-moral terms and then asking your audience to accept that he is a wholly bad thing is a high-risk strategy and may get you laughed out of town. The Devil as pure destruction … has applications.

Argrath is not an attractive character, and we could certainly pitch him as some kind of anti-Nietzsche who refuses to say “yes” to the eternal recurrence. But on the other hand, we could see the gods as unmotivated, stereotyped, destructive behaviour — and our purported excuse for indulging in it: “a big god made me do it and ran away” — and Argrath as the one to break the loops and set “us” free. Remember that in Glorantha everyone is their own worst enemy. Arkat = Nysalor. The Red Moon = Argrath. The point is to cut one’s own head off, and each of us must be our own Argrath. It is OK, you are allowed to put a clothes peg on your nose. Sure, the world is worthy, but it remains worthy when it has been demystified — the gods fed to the Devil and the Devil diced — the mundane world does not need otherworlds and the promise of eternity to redeem it. It is fine as it is. You come down from the trip and find yourself in Leicester. The only dragons are small and feathery, and that is OK. Only kidding: he’s awful, just awful! 😉

So the ritual should be hanging a bell around their neck and riveting it in place, then: the “monsters” can hear them coming; they’ll feel more like brother Yinkin; we can hide when they come looking for “hospitality” and/or someone to bore to death. It is cheaper than a set of iron armour, right?

The flip-flop between Devil as entropy/extinction and Devil as evil. Some may try to square this by having “existence failure” — whether by rapid unscheduled disassembly in some Zen monastery or the slow unwinding of time — as the ultimate evil. As you know, that has never sat right with me.

This I like. The Devil is only found anywhere if you take him with you. I have always hated the Devil — Gloranthan or otherwise — as externalised “moral evil”. An idea as tedious as hell.

And there I was thinking that the Block was what prevented the mundane world being rid of “moral evil”. 😉

The natural enemy of the moth, so the pair represents self-overcoming, like Arkat–Nysalor off in the corner screaming “Gbaji” and beating himself up?

Bat, hummingbird, pterosaur (just me), hummingbird moth, or hummingbird hawk-moth, or … Whichever it is — what day of the week is it? — isn’t the steed of the Goddess just an aspect of the Goddess herself, rather than a fully distinct entity? Multiplicity is to be expected. How long is any true bat’s tongue? But a hummingbird’s is long, as is a moth’s proboscis, more in keeping with familiar iconography and all the better for slurping up souls as if they were nectar. Trochilus pella or Trochilus Peloria? The more terrible the aspect the Bat presents, the more it symbolises the Red Goddess’s ties to the middle world and to power. Don’t think of the Bat being banished if she is starved, think of her being liberated from the middle world if she ceases to commit atrocities. The Red Goddess–Crimson Bat is tortured every time she is fed. The Goddess is like the Legalists’ ideal emperor, nominally in charge but in reality trapped at the heart of the machine. Perhaps the last form of the Bat seen in this world will be something like the final stage of a mayfly: “adults do not feed and have only vestigial mouthparts, while their digestive systems are filled with air” — ooh! symbolic.

When in the 17th and 18th centuries Confucius first attracted attention in the West … [i]t took some time to appreciate that, except for the Mohists, no one in ancient China much cared whether consciousness survives death or whether Heaven is a personal God or impersonal principle, issues of overwhelming importance to Jesuits and philosophes. The attitude of Confucius is that we should not be diverted from human affairs by matters which do not concern us. There is no reason to question that he recognises the sacrifices to Heaven, [and others], as the greatest of ceremonies, harmonising not only man with man but man with cosmos. But for him the value of the ceremony is in the harmony itself and does not depend on anything outside. — A C Graham, Disputers of the Tao (p. 15) Now consider how we view build Gloranthan religion — very Western, very Xtian, very … Modern. No amount of technicolour polytheism will get us off the hook.

In the version where Wakboth comes at stations 2 (empty victory of the RG) and 6 (full victory of the RG), he may stand for nothing more than entering the otherworld (easy — any fool can ‘die’) and coming back (with the goodies = hard). EDIT: Although coming back with the Bat may make the “full victory” over chaos-as-evil ironic and make the “I am the Devil, now” reading tempting. Maybe.

Another reading would be: I exchanged places with Wakboth, and now I am the moral evil of the mundane world [empire, slavery, etc.] and “pinned under the Block” [will soon be reduced to a lump of rock in the middle air]. Then Argrath’s tearing down the Red Moon is liberating Sedenya by an act equivalent to lifting the Block from the Devil. Sedenya’s own illumination was occluded, which is why it yielded power in the middle world. (No, none of this is original, of course — but it seems to fit with both RG as Devil and Red Moon destruction as her liberation.)

Anyway, we drift. Can a shaman act as an intermediary for any god? How far did we get? The god needs a presence on the spirit plane. (Thed, yes. Ragnaglar, the IG, and Wakboth, arguably no.) The shaman needs to be able to frame a contest or deal with the god. (I remain silent on whether this is a matter of scale or subtlety of approach.) Maybe the shaman can deal with a proxy or impostor and still bring back magic. (On the model of heroquests and lesser figures rôleplaying deities.) Doubtless I failed to recall many better points.

And maybe it was only said that she said it. And things done in heroquests may be smaller than they seem — how many ZZ questers have beaten up Yelmalio and stolen his fire powers? It is not so much that they didn’t really do it, more what does it mean for them to have done it, no? A bit like IFWW: did pretty much everyone save the universe alone? But it is not “we formed a massive army we won”. Even the real deal is not as fancypants as people like to make out after they have had the “visitor experience”. To me, it is binding Gbaji — a mere empty shadow of a dead god — that looks like bragging. But maybe it plays better with the punters than “After realising that the demons I fought and ‘beat’ were mere illusions, I realised that I was an illusion too, and I vanished.”

Never read anything by Ken F, but maybe he left ghostly resonances at 19 Gordon Square.

But if we want an explanatory theory, it needs to work for Wakboth, Ragnaglar, and certain other cult-not-currently-possible dead Chaos gods (but not Thed and Nysalor), as some Chaos heroquests do work — take a bow, Sedenya. Against me with my pretend-Jeff hat on, I was reading HeroQuest Glorantha, yesterday, and that seems to suggest Sedenya did encounter Wakboth on her quest, even going so far as to have her say, “I defeated Wakboth and exchanged places with him” (p. 182). (IIRC, Wyrm’s Footnotes #10 doesn’t identify the demon as Wakboth and has its defeat before she binds Gbaji — which makes sense, I think: dismiss/defeat your demons first, then push on to the emptiness of Nirvana.) Although … One way to take the exchange of places is that it reverses her defeat early in the quest, but another might be that she claims her place in the otherworlds by confining Wakboth to this one — that is we have an alternative explanation as to why Wakboth cannot have cult: Storm Bull doesn’t get the credit, Sedenya does, as she stole Wakboth’s seat on the bus. This shouldn’t upset the Storm Tribe too much, as it fits with their narrative that the Red Goddess is the Devil. 😉

Kazoo, comb and paper, whoopee cushion.

I have said it before, but what the hell … for Maran Gor, avant garde gong music. Huge tam tams and such in reverberant underground chambers. Keep away from the raptor mosh pit, though.

Now I am imagining an a party of PCs who are wandering stonemasons who always end up neck deep in and resolving the problems of their geographically scattered client cults. We will start a new trope of hobos on the square. Tattoo of third eye over dividers optional.

The Devil is in the mundane world — oozing evil from under the Block or from every field and particle of temporal reality — so is present in time, sure. Is time or the temporal world, perhaps. It is in the otherworlds that the Devil is — according to this take — absent. To have cult, you need an otherworld presence, right? If you are trapped in this one, no dice. I am not trying to push this view on anyone. I am just trying to make sense of something Jeff wrote. It might not be what he intended, at all. Seems to work so far, but when the decisive experiment disproves it, we can all go down the pub. 😉

So if I have you right — apologies if not — it might not be Wakboth you meet in the otherworld, but you had better believe it is Wakboth or the whole thing might unravel on you. All fine. Isn’t the simplest way to take Jeff’s post that unlike the gods — who are pretty much completely in the otherworld, “locked out of Time” (i.e. out of the mundane world as presently constituted) — Wakboth is completely in the mundane world, pinned under the Block and unable to do anything but poison the mundane world with evil. It is not a view of the world I buy into, but isn’t that what’s being offered? Doesn’t theistic magic go something like this: punch a hole into the timeless otherworld and tap some of that juicy sacrificed POW to produce fireworks? You cannot do that with Wakboth because he isn’t there — you cannot sacrifice the POW, and you cannot reach into the otherworld and let it flow back into this one. Wakboth has no cult, as he is not properly located. A bit like how a living demigod cannot provide rune magic — because they are still of this world? This world is the Devil’s — is the Devil, maybe — so no use trying to work the usual theistic levers to tap Devil magic from some other world. And lest we forget where we are: can a shaman act as an intermediary for Wakboth? The orthodox view — at least as I understand it — is no, for Wakboth has no otherworld presence.

Yeah, the spotted hyena is totally hardcore. I saw a documentary about them many years ago (on a little black and white CRT TV) — BBC2’s The World About Us strand probably, before modern glossy wildlife shows — and just went “wow!” But given their mythic rôle in Glorantha, I wouldn’t make them the insider’s choice of animal companion. (I never liked insiders, anyway.)

I guess — I don’t claim to be any kind of expert — that you do it with proxies, with someone “identifying as” Wakboth, as W his bad self is out of commission. The question then is, who is the proxy if a Wakboth cult is not currently viable? Who plays the rôle of a god besides their cultists? I freely confess that the answer is above my pay grade. (I imagine one meta-reason for a cult of Wakboth being declared impossible is to prevent PC diabolists.) Argrath’s LBQ — like its prototype — is different because at that point the Devil is loose.