mfbrandi

The Fire-Sky mob have the wrong model of vision: they think it is all about sending out laser beams from their eyes, so they see nothing (having long ago burned out their retinas with the reflections), day or night. For ZZ, since swallowing Aether, making sense of the fiery photonic world is not a matter of vision — it is proprioception, kinesthesis. Darkness sits in that happy place: is it the Void, all reception, or is it Water, seeping in everywhere? Yes, I will. Chaos as creation — building the (chemical) elements up from hydrogen — but some can see only fission, tearing apart; too long spent staring into the mirror.

Since reading that, I have been wondering about the zombie creation process: squirt a cup of 1,041,427 SHU down the gullet of a corpse and see it jump up ready for the fight?

This tickled me: After a brief survey of different Egyptological approaches to myth (Assmann, Zeidler, Goebs), Quirke suggests that myths might have been learned through nonlinguistic “information blocks,” rooted in image and performance, which were only translated into words “when some gain offset the effort … [of transforming] fuzzy prototype concepts into rigorous concepts with checklists of features” — Joshua A. Roberson on Stephen Quirke’s Exploring Religion in Ancient Egypt

The bees and Babs threads made me come over all Egyptian (in characteristicly clumsy fashion). And Zac’s ID image made me think again about the CB’s iconography. If we prose Bobby (whose name drops a hint), will it seem less like doggerel? Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favour fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate to say that for destruction ice is also great and would suffice. Darkness (cold, ice) came from Chaos, and we might expect that to be reversible. Darkness and Fire will loop happily in time, but this being time, it won’t go on forever. Is there an exit from Fire to Chaos? What will the Gloranthan apocalypse look like? It is no good asking ZZ — he swings both ways.

Sure, there is this: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/nov/25/is-it-a-bird-is-it-a-bee-no-its-a-lizard-pollinating-south-africas-hidden-flower-aoe But just Google (other search engines are available) lizard pollination for more, including these pics: gecko pollination - 2019 - Moldowan.pdf

That may be true — hence the poll — but my experience in life (i.e. not this forum — no fingers pointed) is that statements like “other people won’t buy it” (supposed statement of fact) are often used as seemingly innocent substitutes for “I think you shouldn’t do it” (value judgement). Doubtless my reading of this thread was coloured by having just been over on the other one. Peace?

The point is to create, not to add to canon. But just to be uncreative, I will recycle a diagram:

Well, it is not a “dumb theory” in the sense of a stupid theory that we love, but it is stupid. Here — and elsewhere — people will sometimes get on their high horses and declare “Glorantha’s not like that.” Sometimes, it is an honest mistake or someone is having a bad day, and that is OK. But if someone solemnly declares and then doubles down on something like there are no potatoes in Glorantha, where’s the fun in that? If people talk about YGWV only in terms of adding to (whatever happens to be current) canon, that is not really variation. Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend. But you know all this ten times better than I do.

Sorry. Just a running gag about the guy with the beard being a washed-up actor hired to do solar PR — and doing a poor job of it. I don’t have any deep wisdom about the sun’s true identity, though I have made various silly suggestions (which I like, but no one else has to). There is always this: Certainly, he said, the One Sun would not come and go, as Sedenya did. — GRoY, p. 24 There is a pompous solar strain that denies the realities of the sun — although perhaps the Solar Cults book will punch holes in that when it comes out — and I like anything that will tweak the patriarchs’ noses: Zorak Zoran, the blessed RG, even Gorakiki Beetle. Or maybe the sun is some random horse running loose in Pent. Or we have a Spartacus/Brian situation: not only — per the Great Beast — is every man and every woman a star, we are all the same star; surely that has cult written all over it.

Typo? “Non-monotheistic” or “henotheistic”? (I’ll admit “non-Monomyth” is much more intriguing, of course.)

Would you trust any spirit with chameleon abilities to dole out not to be a trickster? Chameleon boons: broadcast your emotions in technicolour (even when you don’t want to) hands/feet superbly adapted to climbing trees (but useless for picking locks/running) move really slowly (all the time) an insect-catching tongue (speech is impossible; you only eat bugs) eyes that point in different directions (on turrets — so cool) “Umm … on second thoughts, can I just have the standard lizard regeneration deal?” “Sure: you can now shed the end of your tail and grow it back in a non-matching colour.” “But I don’t have a tail.” “Oh … so what’s that that just fell off?” “Aaaaargh!”

I am not 100% sure he is even the current one. “Rehabilitated” — don’t say that. He is very sensitive and prefers “unrepentant.”

Everything has to be recast with our favourite uncle in the starring rôle. Queering the pitch: it is the law. These fragments I have shored against my ruins: There is a dark sphere. It is hollow. Its inner lining is the surface of the sun. The sphere has a hole in it, or a slit. In the morning, the inner surface passes through the hole: the sphere is turned inside out; the sun is born from darkness. (In the evening? Well, you pick up the pieces, you connect the dots.) The mystics whisper that Zorak Zoran is sometimes called “Sun Belly” and “the Womb of the Goddess.” Every evening, Zorak Zoran swallows/is impregnated by the sun. Every morning, Zorak Zoran gives birth to/vomits up the sun. Zorak Zoran is the passage of the sun through the underworld. (This is called ‘damage limitation.’) Xiola Umbar is said to be a midwife and to clean up her brother’s messes: these things are the same. The secret of the light within. Arachne is the sun spider, yet she is said to give birth to time, not the sun. Why is this, given that time and the sun’s cycles seem so very nearly the same? Spiders and demons both will eat you soon as look at you, but perhaps mortals still refuse to own that the god of hate — Lord Demon of the Legions of Death — and the goddess of nature are one and the same. Wilful blindness. She eats anything caught in her web, and her web encompasses everything: the sun is cosmos and swallowing the sun is being impregnated by the devil. Bright Sedenya, who impregnates the darkness; the darkness, who gives birth to the sun; the sun, who is … [loop] Yelmalio is that of the sun which does not die: Sol Invictus, the winter sun, all the lights of the night sky, our hope as we stare into the void, Rashorana–Nysalor.° But if that is her triumph, it is also his tragedy: never dying, s/he was never born; ever cut off from the cycles of the cosmos, s/he illuminates but is never blown out. No dot, no line. No hole, no slit. No window, no way out. And that’s the truth. (The alternative is to give birth to oneself, but that is chaos.) [Monomyth threatens us: redundancy or monotheism — choose!] ° “All the lights of the night sky” — the management takes this opportunity to deny that these are gobbets of solar semen spaffed against the inside of the sky dome, so go wash out your mouth with walktapus ink if you are the one who has been spreading this scurrilous rumour.

Indeed, if you wanted to do it, you wouldn’t have to swear — or they wouldn’t have to make you swear. They tell you coerced promises don’t count, but they have never meant it.

In the Babs thread, the old blood = beer thing came up again, which set me thinking — in an overheated, unreliable way — but the result probably belongs here. It will certainly have loose ends. I was wondering why Babs got such a solar myth. EGYPT° Hathor/Sekhmet/Bastet/Raet (Hathor–Sekhmet for short) = mother/sibling/placenta/consort/daughter of the sun god = the sun disk (or sphere, red) = the Eye of Ra (the violent sun) = the Morning Star/Venus or Sothis/Sirius (heralds of the sun). Dare we say, the sun seen as female, or the all-purpose solar goddess? At year’s start, Sothis rose just before the sun, heralding the start of the Nile inundation. Therefore, the Eye of Ra precedes and represents the floodwaters that restore fertility to Egypt. In the Hathor–Sekhmet berserker myth, she is sent to destroy mortals by — and is an aspect of — the sun. Is it too much to suppose that the sun’s switch from harsh destroyer to something more benign comes when it heralds the Nile flood? Then the lake of red beer is the Nile floodwater — and possibly also menstrual blood? (I may have left »cough« scholarship »cough« a long way behind by now!) GLORANTHA°° The Oslira = the Nile in miniature. The Red Goddess = Hathor–Sekhmet. Let us try those on, at least. Orlanth claims to have murdered the sun and brought him back, but: “She fought with Yelm and was one of the rebel gods who murdered Murharzarm” — is a very cagey way of saying Sedenya daily “murders” the sun “Certainly the One Sun would not come and go as Sedenya does” — but that is exactly what it does (seven-times faster), and “Sedenya is the source of all powers that are recognized as being cyclical.” The Red Goddess’s “special powers of Time” are constantly doubted, but she gives birth to the sun — her hairy-faced aspect — every morning. Solara Tempora and all that. It begins to look like the boys are fighting the girls for possession of the same myths. Do we believe that handshake between Yelm and Orlanth was the stitch-up, or is it their worshippers who are responsible for the struggle? Certainly, one can see how Sedenya would be cheesed off at being excluded from the new world whose sun she birthed and whose cycles she runs. If the Red Emperor is the sun on earth, then according to this spiel, he is rightly the daughter of the Red Goddess. But he is also the parent of (e.g.) Jar-eel who is the Red Goddess on earth. This is appropriately bootstrappy — per Heinlein & Gerrold — for the Solars, who don’t like to think of the sun as having parents, as such: if the sun must have a parent, it is its own parent. The tension is between “the sun ought to be butch and constant, like a man” and “the actual sun is fickle and cyclical, like a girl!” Anxious geezers see problems where there are none. Anyway, the blood/water/beer of the Nile/Oslira: for it to be of use, it might seem, it has to sink into the earth. I guess this is where Hon-eel comes in. Hon-eel who nowadays sports , but used to own a glyph that seemed to combine : . I guess the trouble with lunar cult runes is that 7M seemed to get it right first time with (paralleling or prefiguring the sun’s , which itself might look like life and death held apart by a pair of breasts — paging Doctor Freud!), but repetition was considered undesirable. It is Sedenya’s labial that keeps the sun of time balanced between life and death, and as paid-up Young Glorantha Creationists, that is the only sun we will recognise. As so often Yelm the ham seems an imposter, brought on to glad-hand when only a beard will do. But who is he working for? Or does that change, too? In time — we trust — all masks will be shed, all illusions stripped away: you say you cannot see the Goddess in the sky in the 4th Age, but surely you can see the sun; the sun is the “invisible” moon, and isn’t that always the way? Alice’s women men can’t see. And if Babs doesn’t hold a harsh axe, who does? [I told you I would ramble.] So Hon-eel’s giving blood to the earth is — from the other end — Babeester Gor drinking blood/beer/floodwater. Life comes only from death. But whose blood (or “blood”) is needed? Who is right, Babs or Hon-eel? Is Babs another co-opted member of the “Fire Tribe”? Is this just cults fighting over a myth? Is Babs the patriarchy’s “monstering” of Hon-eel, or is Hon-eel as we know her as distorted a view — hideously prettified by “Mucha” — of what is really going on? This at least: Sedenya’s light makes the floodwater look red. [Probably best abandoned here: to polish further would be to deny its faecal essence. I was right that it didn’t belong in the other thread, at least.] ————————————————————————————————— ° Bits lifted, remixed, and inexpertly interpreted from these Wikipedia sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sekhmet#Roles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_of_Ra#Roles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hathor °° Quotes from CoR Prosopaedia, mostly p. 108

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sekhmet#Roles

I am not sure that the issue is adultery per se in either of these cases. More like abandonment … and possibly remarriage/bigamy. It is not entirely clear how much agency Helen had in leaving Menelaus/Sparta for Paris/Troy — if you are promised as a prize by Aphrodite, presumably you will go, willingly or not, with good reason or none. Jason doesn’t “cheat on” Medea, he casts her aside to marry a more Greek model — after all she has done for him! This is quite nice from Robin Mitchell-Boyask’s introduction to the Svarlien translation of Euripides: Jason is a shadow of a hero, with not the least whiff of the semidivinity of Achilles or Heracles. He has broken his oaths to Medea, and oaths are sworn to, and thus guaranteed by, the gods. Jason, who pursues magical objects through fantastical means, seems more like a hero from a folktale rather than high myth, the realm to which Medea belongs. The Achillean rage of Medea transforms her into something more transcendent, perhaps a form of Hera, the goddess of marriage Mitchell-Boyask notes also that Euripides’ Medea placed last in the Dionysia of 431 BCE.

LEAVING ULERIA “Uleria is perhaps the single easiest cult to join … to become an initiate anyone can join as long as they are not Chaotic … That’s just no good. No love there.” — Joining Uleria on WoD Uleria is not Love. Uleria is one model of reproduction pushed on us as the essence of creation. But Uleria and Chaos create in different ways.° Uleria’s model is this: either take one thing and Xerox it, or take two things and blend them. This doesn’t get one very far. For interesting results — per the OG Chuck D — one needs both mutation (i.e. Chaos, perhaps even in the form of Pocharngo, whatever the tabloids say) and selection pressure (i.e. Death/Humakt). Without the Lords of Terror, Uleria is nothing. The Order — the sculpted diversity — we see in Life comes from Chaos and Death. But with Chaos, first there was nothing, then there was something. Why? No reason. Now that is creativity. And then there is Mallia, happily reproducing and evolving away without the need to deny the necessity of Death and Chaos. Is that Darkness? If you will, but all the better to soak up the life-giving photons: Mallia’s photosynthesis predates sexual reproduction and multicellular life.°° Everything comes out of its opposite, and Mallia is not foolish enough to deny this. “No sexy vampires in Glorantha? Vampires are the most depressing and horrific creatures … pure ego, no soul, no creativity, no unconscious … driven by nihilistic intellect and twisted hunger.” — Joining Uleria on WoD Frankly, sexy vampires have been boring us for a very long time by now. If Glorantha has its competing Skynets — Mostal (or its cult) and Mother Krarsht (but not her cult) — trying to convert Glorantha into their versions of computronium, these sound like its terminators — draped in human flesh, but in the end seeming no more human than Arnie. Alternative view: the sainted Joanna noted that although we like to knock wannabe vampires, to the powerless — constrained in their Victorian corsets, say — that promise of power has a real and intelligible appeal. Those empowered by the existing order see things differently: uppity virgins baring their necks, don’t they know their place?°°° The virgin’s blood gets spilt either way, but by refusing initiation into Uleria, she exercises her ego, denies the equation creation = reproduction, and reaches for power for herself. Is that wrong? Ah, but if a woman seeks power for herself, she is a monster. Silly me! But at least everyone agrees that sparkly Mormon vampire venom enabling childbirth is just yuck! (What, not even an Orlanthi all?) ° Nysalor taught me this, so it must be true. °° https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthesis#Evolution °°° Yes, yes, I know, but it is a first step on the path.

Hmm … this seems to play to the idea of everyone picks a side — or has one picked for them — and we none of us need those awful people/insects/plants on the other side: if they are pollinators, they can’t be eaters. Isn’t the reality of the relationship between insects and flowering plants more complicated? Bees will take nectar without doing the work of pollination if they can — think of short-tongued bees who punch holes in the sides of flowers to get at the nectar, bypassing the “front entrance” where the pollen-dabbing mechanism is waiting for long-tongued bees. Honeybees steal and eat pollen, and every grain eaten is potentially a fertilisation foregone. There are conflicts between insects and plants — they are playing on opposing teams — and this is reflected in behaviour and biology. (Which are surely more complicated than anything I understand.) That doesn’t mean they don’t need each other.° We may find we need our enemies (even if we have to trick them sometimes) more than we need our allies, hirelings, and slaves — wouldn’t that be a lesson to learn? ° Perhaps this goes for those who eat the whole organism, too: the zebra eaten by the hyena didn’t need that hyena, but perhaps the herd benefits from predation. Perhaps. And if not, think how much darker the Waha–Eiritha relationship looks than it already did.

Dayzatar is above, fastidious: if there is a problem, remove yourself from it. No need to be tough, just distant and cautious. (Avoids death.) Yelm is above and below: sees everything from both sides — which has driven others mad — but perhaps now truly has a hold on justice. (Succumbs to death, but returns.) Yelmalio? Yelmalio is at ground level and walks with us. Yelmalio neither avoids nor succumbs, but walks right through all the dangers and temptations, loses much, but retains a certain purity or integrity. If a little uptight and prickly, I think we can forgive that. (Resists death.) Yelmalio is interesting: he is not a towering illuminated god and not a rune owner; he is on a more human scale, suffers for us and is our light in the darkness, but conspicuously he does not die and return to save us. He is the anti-christ, anti-god, not part of the New World Order Cabal delivering the Compromise (he wouldn’t know how to compromise). He doesn’t quite stand with the gods, but even though he was our hope when everything was sliding into Hell, he is not one of us either, being foreign to death. He is the outsider’s outsider, always alone in a crowd — it is no wonder that ZZ loves him.° [Not a statement of supposed Gloranthan orthodoxy. Your sun gods will vary.] ° The outsider’s outsider — Elmal in contrast is a worm: no longer having a place in the emperor’s court, he bows down to the storm king; anything to fit in, not to have to stand alone. Yelmalio is a good Kantian and a a good Smithian: his judgement and his sins are his own, they belong to him.

Well, Sedenya the Changer is the Moon — right now/in this continuity — but perhaps the reason for that is what the 7M did. Surely no problem with the parents contributing to the offspring’s nature, even if accidentally or because some parts were hard to come by. It is not as if we thought they put her together perfectly — according to the flatpack instructional diagrams — there were a few Allen bolts left over and they used more cheese than the recipe said. Comes out different every time. She is perfectly imperfect, and we love her. I saw her today at the reception In her glass was a bleeding man She was practiced at the art of deception Well, I could tell by her blood-stained hands

I wonder whether that is just parasitoid wasps who think that the broos are muscling in on their territory: “Go get your own shtick, goat boy!”

Is that a retcon? Doesn’t RQ3 Troll Gods have Gorakiki as ancestor of the Timinits? (If pushed, I will happily concede that ancestors specified in myth are not real ancestors.)

And honey bees don’t fly when it is cold and navigate by the sun° — surely, there is a honey bee cult with the heliotropic sunflower as its emblem, which is not to say that there are not other bee cults (with other affiliations). ————————————————————————————————————— ° See also https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2013.0037