mfbrandi

This came up also in the Brand New Gods thread. When it comes to pollination — rather than honey/mead/Minlister — honey bees shouldn’t get all the credit: other bees, other insects (beetles, moths, wasps, … all nominally, at least, Darkness), lizards (Earth), bats (Moon, presumably), birds (Fire–Sky), the wind (Air–Storm), even water (Water!). A pollination cult has the potential to be a union of the elements.

Basically, I think it has been all over the place. Back in (now non-canonical) Storm Tribe (2001, ISS 1310, p. 203), we had: Initiates must never love, make love, have sex, become pregnant, or even fake affection with anything but their goddess. Devotees avoid all physical contact with other living entities. Turning to the Goddess herself, back in (also non-canonical) Wyrm’s Footnotes #9 (1980) when she was still Barbeester Gor, we had: Although young, she is no virgin, for her deeds would be too awful to do alone. Her husbands or lovers vary, and there are some children as well. Now what goes for the goddess needn’t apply to the cultists, but there was certainly a phase when even having a child and giving it to the temple was out of the question. I guess it is all a matter of which misogynistic tropes are most pressing on the male authors when it comes time to type: is it “a mere woman couldn’t have done this without male help — and how else could she get it? <nude, nudge>” (i.e. she did it but she had help) or “powerful women must be unable to feel love — look at them, they are all monsters!” (i.e. she did it but she is an anomaly/not a real woman)? All very How to Suppress Women’s Writing. Ho hum! So, you know, could be worse … I guess. [The RQ3 Gods of Glorantha BG cult write-up is very short and doesn’t mention reproduction IIRC — I don’t know what supplementary RQ3 material might cover that. HQ1 referred back to the Hero Wars material quoted above.]

Because they don’t end well, his sexual frustration increases and eruptions ensue. This is why volcanic soil is so fertile. If he were better at the chirpsing, his people would starve.

Minlister, god of booze, is a beekeeper — for the sake of mead — but I doubt bees worship him (unless in an Invisible God/Ompalam twist). I think there is room for a fire–sky bee cult in addition to the darkness-skewed Gorakiki. Just think of how Japanese honey bees deal with hornets … but maybe they are just ZZ bees.

But it is probably best to start with titles/descriptions — as you have — true and personal names of gods can be added as and when you come up with them and/or the narrative needs them. I mean, terms like “the lord” do a lot of work IRL.

I am sure that used to be the case, but as always, it is complicated (or very simple). The new Prosopaedia seems to pair up grotesque Oria and priapic Lodril (CoR Prosopaedia, p. 78).° FWIW, I do prefer younger brother Lodril as the toy boy of old woman Asrelia — if she must be paired, at all. Oria collapses sideways into Ernalda and Esrola (i.e. the bountiful middle phase of Crone/Mother/Daughter — ibid, p. 93), but of course, they can be collapsed vertically into Asrelia — either Asrelia is their mother, or they will become Asrelia as they become older. (IIRC, these games go back at least to Wyrm’s Footnotes #9.) Some may say that this reflects an attitude that considers all women to be one or at least freely interchangeable — or possibly to be categorised primarily by age & reproductive potential.°° Me? I could not possibly comment. But come the revolution … So Maran Gor may be something like Lodril’s sister-in-law, but that probably does not exclude any other relation — marriage or blood — you care to add. ————————————————————————————— ° See also: Other Names of Lodril °° There is also the scale which ranks the sisters Maran Gor (over on the left: scary and not interested in sex), Esrola/Oria/Grain Goddess (over on the right: oversized and oversexed), and Ernalda (in the middle and in the Goldilocks zone). It is horizontal, not vertical, but hardly an improvement. “You don’t like the way I have categorized you? I will categorize you better.” “Just STOP!”

Urban living, religious orgies, intrigue, and if the Safelstrans are as “cunning, corrupt, perfidious, servile, effeminate, and treacherous” (GtG, p. 376) as people say, I may just fit right in.

Does that make it more playable or less?

What “Auntie L”? Nah, this guy: He didn’t claim to have invented those conceptions, but he drew our attention to them — and you just know which he thought the deeper. Poor lamb.

Little personal gods for home shrines for which no names or stories survive — just like real life (e.g. Sumer IIRC) — and perhaps they will prove too small for Argrath to go to the bother of feeding them to Wakboth!

I like this — possibly because it reminds me of Auntie L’s tale of circle dances and dead relatives seen on the other side of the ring — but I wonder too if there is some kind of rule of three going on. The crone, mother, and daughter may be one goddess. Surely the detached/ascended, regal/middle-air, and earthy/fallen Fire–Sky brothers are in some sense the same god. Deities are collapsible vertically and horizontally, but we don’t like too many segments to the telescope in any one story. And are non-twin siblings a vertical or a horizontal array? So one vertical Storm array might have Umath (out of the picture, like Dayzatar), Orlanth (still contesting the middle air with middle brother/daddy substitute Yelm — whatever hands were shaken and promises given), and baby Barntar grubbing around in the dirt (rival to the farmers’ version of Lodril). To try to squeeze another generation into the same story might be a bit much. But as Barntar is — in one way of looking at it — just Orlanth in drag (with a face like thunder), children of Orlanth might do as children of Barntar, but this brings us awkwardly to the matter of Barntar’s Gloranthan Karaoke party piece. But as you say, Orlanth need not be in the ascendant everywhere and everywhen, so we might sometimes have Umath —> Barntar —> ??? or even Barntar —> ??? —> ???. I wonder what those arrays would look like.

So evil may mean immoral or wicked and we probably wouldn’t say that a dragonsnail is that. It also means harmful or detrimental, which is why — for clarity — the Nysalor write-up says “the illuminated one will know as truth that Chaos is, in itself, neither evil nor inimical” (CoT “Classic”, p. 86, emphasis mine). That is, Chaos is not in itself harmful (according to the illuminate, anyway). So if cancer is supposed to be an example of something inimical but which lacks the personhood necessary to be called immoral or wicked, that seems to miss the point. Whichever side one comes down on as to whether Chaos is inimical, it should be a puzzle that a gang of illuminates so desperately wants to wipe it out. The setting is not meant to give up all of its secrets easily, and perhaps some questions it poses are designed to be undecidable. I don’t know. Dragonsnails might destroy crops, but so might elephants. Chaos doesn’t seem to come into it. As for the peaceful worshipper of Primal Chaos, an Arkati might see them as a tool but nothing more: “their great duty is to maintain order and stamp out Chaos, and they know no limit in pursuing that duty” (ibid, p. 87). An Arkati “never will deal fairly or honestly with any Chaotic being” (ibid, p. 87) — that is not the attitude one has to a friend. The Arkati oppose Chaos and the Dark Side (of their own cult/illumination), but these are not the same thing: “Law and Chaos create in different ways, and all creativity rests upon co-operation between elements of existence. He who operates solely from personal desire will not cooperate, since the childish core of any being’s personality knows no constraint … In this sense, fully Lawful beings can be as much agents of the dark side as was the worst Gbaji prophet” (ibid, p. 87). So the Dark Side is being explained in terms of failure to cooperate and so failure to create — equated with parasitism and failure of , which sounds like one of Steve Ditko’s Objectivist rants — whereas Chaos is able to create and so to cooperate, so some Chaos is not on the Dark Side. It is not that being Chaotic insulates one against being a parasite — the two may be compatible (even if Dark Side childishness cripples the Chaotic being’s creativity, they do not necessarily cease to be Chaotic) — but the gimme gimme gimme, it all belongs to me attitude of the Dark Sider is not Chaos, it is its own thing. In light of all that: So the illuminate who has gone over to the Dark Side — via faulty, self-serving reasoning, remember — might indeed use Thanatari or other Chaos magic to serve their own greedy, childish whims, but how usefully is that described as the temptation of Chaos, rather than the temptation of the Dark Side? They might just as easily have taken magic from a non-Chaotic cult, would we then have said “such is the temptation of [insert runic association here]”? I don’t say that would be inaccurate, but the problem is treating everyone and everything as merely means to one’s own petty ends, no? Of course, every tool has its virtues that make it covetable. Sever Spirit? Tempting!

But then again, why not? I see the appeal of “I am ruthlessly efficient, you are a bit sneaky, but they are unprincipled liars,” but there is the question of Arkat’s great suffering and the “ultimate price” (CoT ‘Classic’, p. 87) he paid. Surely the ultimate price Arkat paid was to become — or to see that he was all along — one of the people he warned us about (or possibly all of them). What could be worse for the Bright One than to be revealed to himself as the Deceiver? If tragic, it should be inevitable: our saviour is himself a miserable sinner, else how could he be human? And if not human, he cannot save us. So Arkat the Deceiver is a canonical Arkat and not just a way to smear Arkat cultists who have fallen off the path. “I would do anything for Law … but I won’t do that.” They may be self-deceivers, but they are not so stupid as not to see the tension, the permanent temptation. Arkat had to fall. If Arkat had not fallen, who would there have been for him to save us from? [I am not sure this all hangs together, and I am not by conviction an Arkat apologist — I am a ∅ fan, after all — but it is the best I can do for Arkat and the Arkati, this morning.]

Or more straightforwardly (😉), every Arkati says (and may even believe), “Of course, I would never favour the Deceiver, but I wouldn’t put it past my fellow Arkati. They are a rum bunch, but don’t worry, I have my third eye on them. Yes, I know we are all Nysaloreans, but we haven’t gone over to the Dark Side en masse — I mean, we are … Zorak Zoran, and where is the Darkness in that? Well, OK, superficially, on the outside, but inside, all Aether!” Self-deceiving, hypocritical, pointless people — but there is one good thing about being an Arkati: even if you are the last person left alive, you’ll not lack for an enemy.

Sudden the desert changes, The raw glare softens and clings, Till the aching Oudtshoorn ranges Stand up like the thrones of Kings — Ramparts of slaughter and peril — Blazing, amazing, aglow — ’Twixt the sky-line’s belting beryl And the wine-dark flats below. Royal the pageant closes, Lit by the last of the sun — Opal and ash-of-roses, Cinnamon, umber, and dun. — Kipling, Bridge-Guard in the Karroo ——————————————————— He may have been … problematic, but there must be a scenario in it. A quiet one, perhaps.

I think — but really, what do I know? — that the Buddhists might agree: in your meditation, you have to get past the stage of “temptation” by hallucinated demons on your way to the peace of being blown out. (But that may just be me ventriloquising Ken, the hippy Trotskyite.)

Are you going to tell my Uncle ZZ that he is not truly illuminated? All that heat, all that pain, all those scars — all for nothing! He won’t take it well. Which is not to say you are wrong, of course. 😉 (Or he is not really a psychopath — but keep that on the down low: it would ruin his rep.)

Some light relief. Perhaps the Arkati are just really poor mathematicians. If the Arkati had been educated at my primary school — in the wake of the “new maths” — practically the first thing they would have been given to do (at four or five years of age) would have been to take a set of crayons to a book full of Venn diagrams. I believe it had an orange cover and many pictures of brass band instruments. Even the naïve do not think they can attack the Void directly, but they are happy to put to the sword all the chaotic creatures with chaotic features — the goatfolk, the “tentacled abominations,” the vegetarians, the atheists, and those who spilled their pints — they can “detect” with their “magic powers.” Some — fancying themselves more sophisticated — started to say, “Of course, Chaos is part of the world.” The more hostile of them excused their attacks on sundry elements of Cosmos, “Chaos is part of the world; how else can we excise it?” The shop steward of the Union of Sane Illuminates and Allied Void Cultists (or ∅, because that is a lot to put on a letterhead) sighed and adjusted the legend on the revised cosmological diagram. “Don’t you see, you fools? Destroy any element of Cosmos you like, Chaos will remain untouched.” The Arkati scratched their heads, because: Everything of Chaos is evil There is nothing of Chaos which is evil Those who were not netted and sent to a remedial set theory class shrugged and continued their crusade.

And yet isn’t this again to equate the dark side of illumination with the essence of illumination? I have never seen what the dark side had to do with illumination, at all. No difference between Law and Chaos, therefore no difference between what I want and what I am permitted Isn’t this explicitly called out as a bad argument, a false parallel? And it is surely not the case that everyone who believes that there is no difference between what they want and what they are permitted to have — between their desires and their deserts — is an illuminate, someone with an insight into the relation between Law/Cosmos and Chaos/the Void … or an insight into anything much, at all. But Glorantha seems to be awash with munchkin illuminates. Why is this? On one level, the game designers having chosen to give illuminates “superpowers,” it was an easy way to give power to the delusional, world-wrecking sociopaths and narcissists: make them illuminates, too, and have them play Pokémon with cult secrets. But this seems like a shallow answer. Another answer is that we only see the munchkins; the illuminates leading the quiet life — the Master Zhuangs? — are invisible. If they don’t blow anything up, we don’t notice them. But that doesn’t seem like the whole answer. I am tempted by the idea that those who see danger in illumination are those who are terrified by the death of God, by the loss of faith, by all that is solid melting into air: if this “truth” is gone, then we are kites without strings, and nothing will prevent us plummeting into the moral abyss or being lost to the wind. “Chaos is not evil” stands in for “God is dead” — if that is true, how will we ever tell right from wrong? I am tempted by it, but it makes me feel like a patronising atheist — editorialising over crises I have never had. You cannot bootstrap morality, and there is no solid foundation to build it on, but what of it? These things were never possible.

In other words, they are the dark side they claim to be fighting. Perhaps they do only fight each other and then succumb to utuma.

Three different (purported) insights: Chaos is not evil The universe has not told me that Chaos is evil The universe has told me that Chaos is evil, but there is no reason to listen to the universe It seems pretty clear — “the illuminated one will know as truth that Chaos is, in itself, neither evil nor inimical” — that the riddlers’ take on Chaos is the first. If the talking universe is just a metaphor, how do we cash it out? Two conceptions of religious morality (owed to our blessed Auntie L): God says it is evil because it is evil It is evil because God says it is evil In the first, God has perfect knowledge and is perfectly honest and open — God is a convenient authority, but we could figure it out for ourselves given time and sufficient brainpower. In the second, there is nothing to know beyond God’s word — God has spoken and there is an end to it; God is not answerable to any discoverable “moral facts” in the universe; God — if you like — is the moral facts of the universe. One kind of worry would be: it seems impossible to decipher morals from the Cosmos, no matter how hard we look; either God has stopped speaking to us or we have lost faith in what She says; we enter crisis, and we feel we must just pick some morality, even if we cannot ground it in anything; we fear that even though a grounded morality is impossible, bad faith is a very real danger (we will pick what serves us and tell ourselves it is right). But have we any reason to think that illumination will get us into that fix?

People try to counter this by focusing on “free from automatic fear of Chaos and the obsession to destroy it” (CoT, p. 86 — emphasis mine) and claim that their fear — or hatred, as it may be — is neither automatic nor irrational, so there is no cognitive dissonance. This, I think, is wrong.° If we look instead at these bits of the Cults of Terror (“classic” edition) Nysalor cult description: Secret Knowledge – the illuminated one will know as truth that Chaos is, in itself, neither evil nor inimical. — p. 86 Once a being has realized that there is no final difference between Chaos and Law, he may later make a similar but false parallel between his personal ethics and his personal desires°° — p. 87 … we will conclude not only that Chaos is neither evil nor inimical, but that it is not even different. That is why detect Chaos is bullshit — there is nothing to detect. It is not so much that illuminates are immune to detect Law/Chaos, but that they are counterexamples to the supposition that the world provides anything for such purported abilities to get a purchase on. “Nothing marks Chaos out from Cosmos” is written on our banner, right? In short, the Arkati project is incoherent and they are all dangerous lunatics. As Arkat is the “inventor” of Zorak Zoran, it should perhaps come as no surprise that it is possible to be illuminated but driven over the edge by one’s illumination and to be engaged in a delusional fight against a foe indistinguishable from oneself. If the true Gloranthan fight is between the cold wind from the outside and the bright fire within, Uncle ZZ seems to embody both. IFWW is self-overcoming, but it is still a mistake. Stop gritting your teeth and just let go … —————————————————————————————————————————— ° Of course, every bit of Gloranthan lore can be read as either ironic or as from the pen of an imagined unreliable narrator, so even if coherent, my interpretation is not compulsory. Nor would I want it to be. °° The “similar but false” here tells us that the no final difference between Chaos and Law bit is true, else it would be “similarly false.”

Oddi as Arjuna?

Indeed. And we wouldn’t want Harrison to be right about us, would we? Abandon control. Learn to live with the anxiety. If you open the box, you may just find yourself with a dead cat to dispose of.

The map is not the territory. The architect’s drawing is not the building. And the score is not the music? Sure doesn’t sound like it.