mfbrandi

You are probably right. LM doesn’t seem like an organisation geared up to generate and circulate knowledge. It is more like a cult of knowledge misers: determined to crash the information economy by taking all the capital out of circulation. — If you want to collect it all, make sure there isn’t too much to collect. If you want to grow knowledge, set it free. — A cult as pernicious, in its low-key way, as Thanatar. All the back-biting and sly manoeuvring of academia — without any of the commitment to research and exchange. I wonder which runic banner true Gloranthan intellectuals — let’s park the Nysaloreans and Godlearners for a moment — would march under. One of these? Who knows?

This is the same Kwasi Kwarteng who was Liz Truss’s Chancellor of the Exchequer (finance minister), right? So not a man of rock-solid judgement. 😉 If you want a maximally skeptical view of the British Empire, I suspect this won’t be it. Do we get a book report?

Has anyone riffed on the Gloranthan West as the land of the dead? Plenty of ex-Lunars with seven souls to take on the hike. The Devil as Argrath’s atom bomb/soul killer? In the retconned away so neatly no one even knows where it was or what it was called sense? Great as a story/myth, but presumably tricky to evidence if considered as history. An awful lot of void to eke out the concentrated packets of reality?

But which would we choose, some crash bang wallop Avengers or Star Wars movie in Dolby THX, or the much cheaper, monochrome La Pointe Courte and À bout de souffle? Or put another way: we have lost the T. rex, but we still have plenty of dinosaurs, and I see them perched on the tree outside my bathroom window every day. The religious vision or the acid trip fades, but now take another look at the mundane world — the “magic” is still there, right? So maybe something is lost in the transition to the Fourth Age, but maybe the Fourth Age is “bigger” and more “open” than the prior ages and the Godtime. Maybe. Sometimes thinning is the happy ending (and screw the Inklings). 😉

Maybe it tastes like Guinness.

Runic associations are perhaps just representations we mortals make, and not facts we discover about the gods. Consider: Mallia is associated with the Runes of Death and Darkness, her foundations and heritage. Where she is worshipped by broos she also is associated with the Chaos Rune. — Cults of Terror Classic, p. 26 So does Mallia “possess” the Chaos rune or not? Is it just that some worshippers approach her through it? Is it just a mark on parchment?

For present purposes, the Devil is not to be thought of as Cosmos or of Cosmos — think of the Devil as the empty set (i.e. {} or ∅), and if you are an atheist, think of the IG as the universal set. (There are other tales to be told of the Devil in which it is — or is stitched right through — the world of Time, but at least some Westerners will reject them. Although the set-theoretical sorcerers will smirk at this confident rejection.) For present purposes, think of the IG and the Devil as uncontactable — you cannot communicate with them, and you get sorcerous powers by understanding Cosmos, not begging favours from it or its owner or agent; IIRC, Jeff has it that the big guns of Chaos (the Devil candidates) — Ragnaglar, Kajabor, & Wakboth — are dead or uncontactable “at the moment;” IMHO, there are good reasons why this should be the case. Reflective and wise monotheists won’t play “my dad is bigger than your dad” with the polytheists — the correct way to place yourself in the hands of the IG is to shift for yourself (don’t pray and wait, put the hours in at the lab; don’t clasp your hands in prayer, grab the steering wheel), then when you succeed, you humbly acknowledge that it was the IG’s will (and the same if you fail, but it is up to you to try). This is not a lecture on Malkioni orthodoxy, and the polytheists will scoff at it, but if you think of the IG as the god of the philosophers — the ones that haven’t taken the Journey to the East, at least — you won’t go far wrong. Gloranthas can and should vary — in this, as in all else.

So how about some wordplay-based poison as an export? If you grind any obsidian remnant of the Palace to extreme fineness, then via alchemy — or a curse (accounts vary) — it becomes a deadly poison. Well, deadly to anything that lacks the constitution of a troll, vulture, or hyena. Known as “church grain,” “stained glass,” and “Ezkankekko’s revenge.” “I know it is expensive, but the grinding is skilled work: if the grains aren’t fine enough, no poison; if the obsidian is not from the Palace, no poison. This is no cheap knock-off. Undetectable — my word on it! If anyone asks, you have a rodent problem. You didn’t buy it from me. In fact, we never met.” The term ground-glass, as it relates to poisoning, is a corruption of grain d’église, the term given … to the seeds of … Abrus precatorius. The seeds contain the extremely toxic lectin abrin, whose toxicity is over 30 times that of ricin. — Wikipedia: Ground Glass

The Black Desert and hunting gazelle with “kites” — here or see open-access PDF below. life in the black desert.pdf

Or as the Nysaloreans put it, “Holmes knows that he is in Watson’s stories, but does he know that he is in Conan Doyle’s?”

The IG is what is real, Cosmos — hence — and the Devil (pick one) is what is not, Chaos/the Void — . The IG is not a power in the universe, the IG is the universe. Looking for the IG (or the Devil) in the universe is a mistake, that is why the IG is “invisible.” Is Cosmos master of itself? What would that even mean? Or that may be the take of the fashionable pantheist-about-town. There is no need for all the myths to cohere into a model of reality we can build from Meccano.

Some entirely frivolous suggestions: The most flippant answer is “retrace your steps (taking care not to step on any butterflies),” but that isn’t very entertaining. You may have altered the Godtime in such a way that your path is no longer there to go back along. In that case, look for another pre-existing path to something familiar from Time, or — more fun? — frantically make more edits in the hope of establishing a new path to the familiar. Perhaps all that got caught in the net was the Devil — the world is the Devil, and from some points of view, you are better off not finding your way back: if you stepped out of Time to seek power, renounce that and look for a quiet bit of myth to settle down in.

Well, I guess it depends on how you view the division between myth and history. The Society for the Appreciation of the Golden Age has always been telling us that it was better back then, but what if the “events” of the Golden Age are “only” part of myth, not history? I don’t mean that disparagingly, but consider: Navigation through the Hero Planes uses Myths to get to events, not maps to get to locations. However, the Myths are not objective reality, but subjective by their very nature. — Guide to Glorantha, p. 155 The modern English “truth” comes from Old English … meaning “faith, faithfulness, fidelity, loyalty” … This is why we talk about remaining “true” to something. “Fact,” by contrast, comes from the Latin factum, “something that happened, something real.” The two have nothing to do with one another except in the post-Enlightenment mutilation of language so that only what can be seen under a microscope is of value. But what it comes down to is “fact” is something we can see, and “Truth” is something we feel. — Andrew Logan Montgomery, Cults of RuneQuest: Mythology (Part One) If the myths are “true” in that they accord with our feelings, not the facts, then isn’t the SAGA line “just” an expression of pessimism about the world? Joy in the mundane is possible — that’s the mystic’s trick. “Once upon a time, when things were better than they will ever be again …” — is that the story we want to be faithful to? (Of course, bad things happen in history, too, and ALM would think I have missed his point entirely.) Do we measure the world’s thinning with a ruler? I am going to guess not.

Or the modern German “weiter” (adverb, adjective) with its connotations of further, other, and beyond — might do for a spirit entity. If “Nach dem Tod gibt es noch weiter?” means what Google thinks it does, I guess your average Brithini is determined not to find out. (I never could get the hang of German, which is probably why my English is so bad.) Given the West’s supposed failings of empiricism and materialism, it is a shame that this stubbornly refuses to resolve to “engineer.” (The best I can manage is “enginor” — and that really won’t do.) And of course, the category includes the writers and teachers — the engineers of human souls.° —————————————————————— ° To me from a bunch of scary people via Škvorecký.

This is definitely not a scientific survey, but the issue of whether the single-p or double-p spellings of words related to “worship” — so “worship(p)er”, “worship(p)ed”, and “worship(p)ing” — should be used in the Mythology book came up in the other place. As far as I can tell, both “p” and “pp” are correct in American English, so if Chaosium picks one for a book and applies it fairly consistently, I assume they mean it, and it is fine by me. If it varies across different publications or lines within the business, I don’t mind. Your tolerance may vary. (Of course, deep down in my dark atheist heart, it is double-p all the way, but this post is not prescriptive.) I had a look over some old Gloranthan publications — various publishers and eras — to see which way things went. Some of this was quickly scanning paper copies, so I may sometimes claim some publication was consistent, although in truth it was not. I mean I am crazy, but not crazy enough to do a thorough job of this. I found the results — such as they are — inexplicably fascinating, although none of it really matters. RuneQuest 2, Cults of Prax, & Cults of Terror (1978–1981) — pp RuneQuest 3: Introduction to Glorantha Booklet (1984) — p RuneQuest 3: Gods of Glorantha (1985) — p Hero Wars: Roleplaying in Glorantha (2000) — pp HeroQuest 1 (2003) — pp HeroQuest 2 (2009) — worshipers, worshippers, worshipped HeroQuest Glorantha (2015) — worshippers, worshipers, worshipped, worshiped, worshipping, worshiping 13th Age Glorantha — worshipers, worshipped, worshiped RQG Quickstart (2017) — worshipper, worshipers, worshiping, worshipped, worshiped RQG Starter Set Glorantha Book (2021) — p (with a stray “werewolf-worshipping” — presumably a cut-and-paste from an earlier work) RQG Prosopaedia (2023) — p So there does seem to be a drift over time from double-p to single-p — if my sampling is representative, which there is certainly room to doubt. Any disorder in the middle is clearly due to Eurmal and not the fault of the editors and proof-readers. I wonder whether Avalon Hill had early adopters of the single-p spellings, or whether the original Chaosium crew were contrarian holdouts for the old ways, even in the 1970s. Not a topic with legs, and if you found this as intriguing as I did, you should probably make an appointment with your therapist. 😉

As you say, whatever the players want is fine, but I think it would be refreshing to sometimes speak of — for example — Orlanth Rex as Vinga’s regal aspect, or just Vinga, King of the Gods. Ponder whether there is a difference between “Batman = Bruce Wayne” and “Batman = a disguise Bruce Wayne wears (and not really a person).”° I do not have a lecture to give on that subject. 😉 ———————————————————————— ° One might have said a rôle Bruce plays, but, you know …

It may look like the mote in God’s eye — ego blinding him — but perhaps the dot in is Stevenson’s black spot marking Yelm for death. Or the hole from which the young scarab emerges, like a dead emperor emerging from his tomb to reign again. It looks like a flaw, but truly it indicates his superpower. In contrast, the unblemished of Yelmalio and others may indicate impenetrability, but that is achieved by ceding power and refusing knowledge. Withdraw and withstand, these are viable moves but they are not power moves. Yelm knows that by going with the flow and accepting the pointy end of death, he will secure his reign in Time. One suspects that his power is like that of the ideal emperor of the legalists: the empire runs itself and the emperor has no freedom; if the emperor asserts himself — goes against the flow — all will turn to shit. But whatever the motives of the “rebels,” their actions may serve to establish universal order — Osiris is nothing till Seth kills him. Similarly, it is only eternally resurrecting Yelm that is of interest. If the blue fellow hadn’t obliged, Yelm would have had to hire an assassin — or possibly his young self could have been called upon to do it. And one’s young self (past) may be one’s child (future self), for these are the circles gods move in.° Is there an Osiris figure for the sun to merge with on its nightly journey? The fertility of the earth — does this bring in our old friend Genert in any way? Resurrected but still in the land of the dead? Surely Hon-Eel’s human sacrifices connect. ————————————————————— ° Think Vinga as both young Orlanth (Adventurous) and daughter of Orlanth. A circular collapsible telescope — the mind boggles.

Well, looking or … The hand has a long history as a sexual instrument; the designation … ‘God’s hand’ — an epithet of several goddesses and a title borne by some God’s Wives of Amun — refers to the hand that (Re-)Atum used to masturbate in order to bring forth the rest of the Ennead. — Lloyd Graham, From Isis-kite to Nekhbet-vulture That is one way to quickly populate a solid sky dome with stars if you are as intercourse averse as Yelm, I guess. The words for kite and hand are the same in Egyptian — apparently — gives a whole new meaning to “a bird in the hand” (or vice-versa).

It is a non-problem, so it doesn’t need a solution. Machine-built machines are fine (and already part of the story, right?), but they won’t show the dwarfs the way out of the fly bottle — if they are even in it. 😉

A lot of things are claimed by or on behalf of the Mostali or the dwarfs. It is probably impossible to believe all of them at once: Maker is a primal dwarf concept … He assigned the world’s natural laws and built the Spike. He is sometimes confused with Mostal or the World Machine by non-dwarfs. — GoR Prosopaedia, p. 80 Utriam is one of the names for the Spike, the Cosmic Mountain built by Acos and his son Mostal. — GoR Prosopaedia, p. 127 Pre-Creation … Dwarf — the World Machine Before creation the World Machine, personified as Mostal by the ignorant, is set into motion. This event, which dwarfs alone still remember, begins all the impersonal processes which make the world. — GoG Cults Book, p. 6 Creation of Elder Races Dwarfs — creation by Mostal The World Machine, as part of its designated function, manufactures a race of beings to oversee and tend to it. These are the first dwarfs. — GoG Cults Book, p. 7 Dwarf Array Dwarf mythology begins with Mostal and Stone, primeval brothers. Mostal made crude images of himself, thus forming the Stone Mostali who helped make better living images … and so on until the octagony of Ancient Metals was formed. The eight Mostali races together made the World Machine. When other gods’ recklessness broke the machine, the Clay Mostali, or dwarfs, were created to swarm about and fix it. — GoG Cults Book, p. 13 The Foreman’s Words Where do we come from? You were made like other tools. Like the World Machine itself. All true life comes thus. Maker Maker is the name of those laws of the ancient universe which formed the World Machine. Once the World Machine was finished, Maker was subsumed by its operation. Mostal Mostal is the World Machine, now dead. One day it shall live again. Ignorant outsiders personalise Mostal and equate him with their own simple-minded religions. It is well that our foes do not understand us. — GoG Read Me First (handout sheet) It seems to me — with my feeble mind — that what the dwarfish theologians are grappling with is the supposed problem of a watch without a watchmaker: by calling it a “watch” they are implying agency behind its creation; they are talking themselves into a chicken and egg argument — if it is a tool, there must be a toolmaker. But at the same time, they want to believe in an impersonal universe: the World Machine arises from natural law, not anyone’s intention. I would say that they need to make up their minds, but likely not every dwarf believes all these things: two people, three opinions, and an argument — that is how we like the world. For those who object, I guess the problem with growth is that it just happens, impersonally, messily — not neatly, according to a master builder’s blueprint. The dwarfish internal disputes get projected onto the Aldryami with unfortunate consequences. “Was alive, now dead” equates (roughly?) to “was orderly and planned, now messy and spontaneous” — so they misunderstand life, growth, and the “mechanisms” of the world. Natural laws are not legislated and require no legislator. Alternatively — of course — whenever one sees agency or purpose in accounts of dwarf belief, this indicates a failure of the humans writing it down to grasp the perfectly coherent and impersonal dwarfish cosmology. It was all lost in translation, replaced by talk of gods, personalities, genealogies, and plans. Alternatively again, the old-time Mostali knew what they were about, but the degenerate modern dwarfs are benighted “cargo cultists.” This seems a rather cruel vision — let’s bin it. Of all the quotes above, the one which most resonates is the vision of the uncreated “machine” preceding all else which begins to tick. I am even charmed by the dwarfish fantasy — a poetic fancy, not a lie — of remembering being there for the first tick: “We understand the world, even if you do not. We know where it all went wrong!” Finally: Individualists believe that all dwarfs have, or can have, a soul made in the image of Mostal. The implications of this philosophy shocked dwarf society when many formerly tame dwarfs decided to seek their own destiny and creativity. — GoR Prosopaedia, p. 62 Naïvely, one might suppose the attribution of individual souls to dwarfs to be the issue, but surely to the sophisticated dwarf-about-town, the problem is supposing that Mostal has (or had) a soul — that is the true scandal. The good dwarfish “theologian” is a good atheist and does not fear brute facts. The world just is. Reconciliation with the Aldryami is possible, and the future is here right now, if you’re willing to pay the cost. 😉

Hmm … maybe. I mean I wouldn’t want to disagree, but it is my nature to wonder. Before there was Life or Death, there was the Machine. The World Machine is not alive, not dead, and not undead either. Let us say that the Machine was always there — just not always ticking down to Doomsday.° What is the Machine made of in its pristine state? I would warrant it contains many metals. Certainly iron, tungsten, and all the radioactive lovelies. Bronze is likely a symptom of malfunction. Every Mostali “invention” is a revelation of something already contained in the Machine. Inventing new stuff is the sort of thing Our Blessed Mother of the Healthy Appetite does — it is not something for battery-operated garden gnomes: they are too much chips off the old mechanism. The “purpose” of iron weapons? To render early (pre-human versions) down to legitimate ingredients of construction projects, untainted by ? (Like the druids of our imaginations cutting mistletoe only with a sickle of an appropriate metal. Is it mere ritual, or is it magic?) If it seems not to work so well on humans, is that because they already carry the poison in their blood — because they are already in some liminal state? (I could blame this farrago on my own stupidity, but my pitiful excuse is that my Mostali and dwarfish informants need so much high-grade lubricant to get them to talk that they are never both forthcoming and coherent.) ————————————————————————————— ° “Always” to be taken with an amount of NaCl.

Perhaps these represent the poles in deities’ attitudes: names don’t matter: they are just labels names are power: no one gets to use my true name Egyptian gods were keen not to give away their true names — not even to other gods. (See “The True Name of Ra” in Geraldine Pinch’s Egyptian Mythology, pp. 69–71. It is not “Ra,” obviously, but crafty Isis manages to get it out of him.) For some gods of the lozenge, one might see the progression over time from proper name to “my [lord|lady]” to simply “the name.” Deities might want to put a bit of distance between their name (or names) and their worshippers’ lips. “But how do we route worship?” Proxy servers, onion services (Tor), darkweb (Pratzimnet) — all available from Krarsht, whose true name is unknown. “Misnaming” sounds like a problem for thoroughly modern mortals (who protest that they are not all Millie). To be misnamed, misgendered, and unseen might suit some ancient gods down to the ground. 😉

I think the “as above, so below” may have been confusing. I know you caught me out (not hard). Here above is human/ground level (cultic goings on) and below is underground (where the mines are), right? Not heaven and earth but on the earth and under the earth. Love it! They are horse archers. Too many suns? Shoot some down. (Don’t get carried away, though. That way madness — — lies.) Is this the heart of the Nysalorean mystery? Our god is dead, so you’d think we’d be left in peace. Our god is dead, but we have killed him — “I am Arkat, and so is my wife” — and some of us just cannot get over that, so we persecute ourselves and our sub-crustal co-religionists … or something/nothing like that.

Thanks for your comments, Nell. As you might imagine, I have come to regret the comparison. Mostly because it triggers people (not you) to justify Storm Bull killings. I should have seen that coming. I am an idiot. However, because I never learn: isn’t the mafia primarily motivated by money — with a side order of “honour” — while the Storm Bull cult is seemingly more ideologically motivated (the world must be “cleansed” of Chaos — a different rôle for De Niro, perhaps)? The Urox cult is disorganised crime with a mission, the mafia is organised crime with no mission beyond lining it pockets. Roughly right? As for Storm Bull and racism, I see no reason to think that — for example — the cult has a particular animus toward people of a certain skin colour. I think it probably is safe to say that SB cultists are xenophobic: “[they] will distrust strangers and their odd gods” (Cults of Prax Classic, p. 19) — but that would hardly make them unique in Glorantha. If the Uroxi wanted to slaughter all broos, scorpion men, and ogres, would that make them racist? Technically, I guess it would not, but is that a distinction which matters? Do they — in fact (yeah, I know) — want to do this … on the basis that these peoples are tainted by Chaos at the level of blood or inheritance? I am not going to try to answer that. Isn’t the (possibly misconceived) “point” of fantasy species — or “races” — that they stand for different tendencies in us? If that is a correct interpretation, then the question becomes whether killing those species — individually or in pogroms — stands for eradicating those tendencies in us (individually, via self-reflection, say) or for eradicating those of us with those tendencies (killing stands for killing). Possibly neither, right? But the question arises. I am not going to try to answer that one, either.