mfbrandi

Not only is the great spud abolition taking food out of the mouths of the poor, it is Light Son abuse: if they cannot deny themselves potatoes while others tuck in, what have they left to live for?

It is the Traveller/Trophy Gold call to adventure.

I dimly remember an old Bruce Sterling story about how intelligence was overrated as a survival strategy. 😉

Argrath and Harrek as twink and bear. Odds evened as in a glass darkly?

O Turba of Philosophers and disciples, now hast thou spoken about making into white, but it yet remains to treat concerning the reddening! Know, all ye seekers after this Art, that unless ye whiten, ye cannot make red, because the two natures are nothing other than red and white. Whiten, therefore, the red, and redden the white! — A. E. Waite (trans.), Turba Philosophorum Black, white, yellow, red — does Glorantha have the stages of its great work in order? Has the rubedo (Sedenya) subsumed the citrinitas (Yelm) — is that the a meaning of the Red Emperor? Will AEW referee the — nonviolent, one imagines — struggle between the White Moonies and the Nick Drakeys?

Smoking Mirror Heard something on the radio this morning about John Dee’s obsidian spirit mirror. This made me think of both Shadow Plateau/shattered palace trade goods and the rôle of the God Learners in the Jrusteli imperial enterprise. You can make up your own magical uses for an Aztec black glass mirror with all its fire and darkness connotations, but I was struck by how it was polished: rubbed with bat guano — because batshit contains tiny bits of abrasive chitin, IIRC. You just know that when the Lunars get hold of these mirrors, they are going to polish them with Crimson Batshit. Oh my!

That old red, BB’s “Paradise and Hell can be one city.” Like everything else in Glorantha. Chaos seems to be Glorantha’s essentially contested concept. 😉

No, @Erol of Backford would love it. 😉

Thanks for this. Ideology is the purest expression of MGF. And in Glorantha false consciousness seems to run riot: only the illuminated have a chance to see clearly, but — by pressure of lore and fan desire — we are asked to see them as even crazier than the rest. Personally, I would say let everyone be complicated and look for factions that reach across the “obvious” borders. For example, whatever baggage goes with I Fought We Won will be found in many species and cultures, and presumably it can be used to drive cross-cultural, multi-species factions. I am not sure that is the fun way to look at it. After all, as you say: The uz have been driven to eating their own children and regarding them as less than , but whatever the KL mainstream thinks, in my twisted imagination, the Old Dark as represented by the three curious spirits seems to see the enlo differently: Argan Argar gives them spears and shades Zorak Zoran accepts them if they are tough enough Xiola Umbar has its Bene Gesserit “breeding programme” (not to produce Kyle MacLachlan, but to transform the whole species)° The three friends have different strategies, but they all learned early on that had to function in a world that would contain just as much . Looked at one way, the “curse” of the kin was a blessing: many children and many mutations, so many chances to adapt to the world of Time and its ever-moving sun. Sure the “mistress race” (just a gender flip of the IRL fans of the Black Sun) is big and strong, and ants, cockroaches, and enlo are “small and weak” … but that is part of their strength. Evolution trumps “eugenics,” and fitness is not much like what the right imagined. The mistress race is blond, but the enlo are “latterly darkened.” So not only does troll society have a massive rift, one side of the split holds to what is pretty much unspeakable: We must adapt or die — autogenocide is no solution! The most despised of us — our litter-born children — are our future. Soon the mistress race will be just a bitter memory — then they will fade even from myth. Sure, our great-great-great-grandchildren won’t be able chew the sacred images from rock, and the drinks we enjoy would kill them. You say our culture will be lost. I say we will be transformed. I won’t be there to see it, but one day, the little ones will run and laugh in the midday sun. At this point, the prophet was torn apart and eaten by the more conservative members of her community, but the XU sisters had listened — because weird is good. They hid their smiles, and — like the spider — made their secret plans. The secret of the light within will have its mystical aspect, but there is something absolutely down-to-earth practical about befriending Yelm, the “enemy.” By now — naturally — canon has been forgotten, and your Glorantha will vary differently. ————————————————————————— ° Surely, we have all of us thought that the trollkin best adapted to the surface and the sun don’t live with the backward-looking uz — XU releases them into the wild to live as what they are, the human race (diurnal trolls). We are all uz.

Well, I don’t mind the Yo-yos being hold-outs for the old ways … but not those old ways. If we are going to associate Yelmalio with a Coltrane, there is a more obviously solar choice, no?

But doesn’t it depend on how seriously we take the cold sun aspect of ? After all: The Italian word solleone means “dog days,” the days from early July to early September, when the weather is hot and sultry. At one time the hottest days were thought to be caused by the Dog Star, Sirius, which rises and sets with the sun at this time. For part of this time, the sun is in the zodiacal sign of Leo the lion. — Stuart Kaplan, Solleone Tarot Instructions But I am sure we could work around it, if motivated: if Yelmalio — whatever his origin — is not part of the reborn sun (having never died), we can see him as something of an embarrassment for the mainline solar cult in Time (possibly also the other little suns — hence the desire to consolidate them all in one easy-to-manage Lightfore, who has the decorum never to be where the boss sun is). We can see the lion in the dog days as stalwart Yelmalio resisting the attempt of the reborn Yelm to burn him from the face of the earth — we can have lion and sun imagery belonging to Yelmalio considered as a dissident solar cult. This can also be cast as “uptight” suspicion of illumination — where Yelm’s death is ego-death — and of solar cults which sacrifice people (Black Sun & Blood Sun). Lion-attacking-horse icons would really put the cat among the pigeons. Lions associated with bull-slaying deities would wind up the storm crew. The lion and sun can also be a symbol of the pre-revolutionary regime (because is always at least potentially part of the awkward squad): Or we could let the fiery sun crew have the lion (if they want it). Or — of course — none of the above.

They are called “caprati” (goats) — are you telling us that lunar connections the worst you can imagine?

»If« Google Translate is to be trusted, “we bring back the potato” might come out something like “papata kutichimunchik.” It has a certain ring to it … probably. 😉

Don’t let me put you off. Trust your own judgement. It is not as if I have even read the thing! I am sure he has his axes to grind, but don’t we all? I seem to remember hearing a biographical sketch of old KK — before his infamous budget — and IIRC correctly, people who met him were impressed by his intelligence. But if you come to think you are always the smartest guy in the room, things may not end well. 😉

Where, perhaps, they meet up with their mountain-dwelling cousins (Tapirus pinchaque; perhaps here we can leverage the ‘c’ and ‘k’ spellings: “they all look the same” to the two-legs) who — rumour has it — heroquested to retcon out of the timeline their sworn enemies, the puma people (the mean three-legs).

So how did the Morokanth lose this “Wonderhome” — their (newly retconned) ancestral Eden — and end up living with those mad bastards in Prax? Did they go on a quest to start the oh-so-necessary dust storms and never make it back? Because of the shame of ritual flesh-eating? l Do the Incafied Lunars march into Dragon Pass under the banner Solanum tuberosum redux? I think this is the sort of thing — your conception, not answers to my stupid questions — that I would like to see on the JC: properly variant Glorantha; no messing about. 😉

For those who are interested: Tristram Hunt’s Observer review Linda Colley’s Guardian review This amused me: So, with relentless obsession, Kwarteng charts the class and schooling of the great men of empire. Lord Curzon, we are told, finished Eton as captain of the Oppidans, “the senior boy in the school who was not one of the seventy King’s Scholars (who were from less distinguished social backgrounds but were generally academically more able)”. — Tristram Hunt (Kwarteng was himself an Eton King’s Scholar, but that is not to say his self-serving observation is incorrect.) Public school idiots let off the leash does look like a playable vision of empire.

Just for clarity — not to undermine what you say in any way — my scare-quoted “we” was meant to indicate 3rd-Age polytheistic Gloranthans (characters), not 21st-Century Earth people (players). My apologies for being unclear.

Back in HQ1 days — if I have the right rune — I believe they did use it: … but that is very much ex-canon.

I do, and sometimes I think of it as the key to Godlearnerism. I sometimes like to think of the GLs as operationalists: [who] rejected the idea of nature as a thing-in-itself existing behind the appearances observed in experimentation. — Brittanica: Operationalism “Screw the big metaphysical picture — experiments show it works.” It sometimes seems to me — but I am funny that way — that when people speak up for the polytheist on the Genertelan omnibus, they fall into the trope (not necessarily the trap) of “of course, we are all Godlearners, now.” I am not saying that is wrong, but it always seems a bit hard on the Godlearners themselves: “we” all think like that, now, but they were the ones who deserved to be blown up for thinking that way. Everybody else’s Glorantha will certainly vary.

Sure, but if fire spear magic were commonplace (or at least, well-attested), it wouldn’t get filed as “one of those odd things that only happens in myth” by the intellectuals — it wouldn’t be among the anomalies to be “explained away” (or whatever treatment they thought appropriate). Magic wouldn’t be a marker of myth. Magic would be mundane, right? Thus “tales of gods are really tales of powerful magicians” might get more purchase than it would here and now — though what the Gloranthans would do with that, I couldn’t say. What would continue to mark out myth from history? One thing — presumably — would be that contradictions (as opposed to uncertainty) would be tolerable in myth. Always a good marker of story. 😉

What the others said … but West as the direction of godlessness is a possible position, too, right?

But, you know, why not? Our ancient world had its share of intellectuals discussing the nature and status of myth — including its rationalisers of myths. Sometimes, perhaps, as a way of attacking or debunking myth; sometimes as a mode of myth-making. Let us not lobotomise the Gloranthans.

Though one hopes for a tropical philosophy where the year counts for very little and the familiar building blocks of myth are recontextualised. What do the yellow elves have to say for themselves? Perhaps: Shall we their fond pageant see?