mfbrandi

1 hour ago, Deepest_Lore said:

Is that canon?

Is it canon that it happens, or is it canon that Gloranthans will in the future tell the story of Argrath and the Devil?

I will put my neck on the line and say that it is canon that Fourth Agers tell the story. It works as an aetiological myth of how Glorantha got thinned into Earth or at any rate a more Earth-like world. My take is creation won’t be finished till the magic goes away. So I would say the myth tells a truth about the world — if only a “poetic” truth — but would you want to go on a fact-checking heroquest to see just how things went down?

Someone will post to disagree with everything I have said. Listen to them, not me.

3 hours ago, Joerg said:

This makes me wonder how much the Gods War is old beef re-heated.

And every Gloranthan war since? Have these people no imagination?

3 hours ago, Joerg said:

This makes me wonder how much the Gods War is old beef re-heated.

So the rebels kill the OG sun — probably in assassination of Julius Caesar or Murder on the Orient Express fashion — and probably for no better reason than that each of them wants to be in charge. (In time, the resulting world shows promise: cyclical ebb and flow; rotation with neat little epicycles. The only catch is the amount of noise the wind makes. But I am getting ahead of myself, and consequences are often unintended.)

Older beef than this? Bitter struggle among the Trotskyites — or if you were never there, all the factions in Life of Brian — such that every knife plunged into the sun was imagined to be ending a comrade? With the sun in the underworld, their internecine fury is given full rein — hot red-on-red action as each struggles to occupy the same niche: chair of the party, then Emperor of Everything (bow down gods and mortals, you are not worthy). Lots of small-c chaos.

In the short run, is in the ascendant, but perhaps is playing a long game by getting stitched into the Compromise. But by reaching so far into Balance and the Void, perhaps Sedenya — the er — has guaranteed that in the long run, no one can be Emperor.

All to the good, but was that Her divine plan? The White Moonies may think so, but maybe it is just — which is what you get when you tear away some of the Spider’s web.

Clearly, there is a Lunar faction we can call “Continuity Yelm” (well, we can call it that) who want the grandson of the sun to sprinkle the rest of us with His celestial golden shower in perpetuity — but we all hate those guys: that leaky dick-waving isn’t the feminist revolution we signed up for, is it?

But which is the true route through?

There is the Argrath way:

But that just repeats the primal scene, and if you tear it down, you’ll only have to bring it back, over and over (and that is quite another song).

If the red of the moon is just the blood of our own eyelid superimposed on Her face, maybe it is time to open it away from the bullskin crazies, the Arkati thought police, and the shaven-headed life coaches muttering “occlusion” like a pack of demented dentists:

Don’t make the (textually) corrupt choice.

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When the RV Common Good took the supply contract for the Solomon's House base on Topheth it seemed like an easy job, despite the dangers posed by any Gehenna world. But arriving on Topheth the crew find themselves in a race against time to save the scientists, and themselves.

So how did it go?

If we take the runic opposition too seriously, we will become like the narrator of The Island of Dr. Moreau.

2 hours ago, David Scott said:

Herd-Men are bestial, savage, feral, wild, and untamed. As children of Eiritha they are effectively domestic animals.

I am not interested in rules lawyering or promoting one version of RQ over another, and if I were, this wouldn’t be the right forum, anyway.

However, David’s comment does illustrate what I was trying to call attention to — not to tell you what you must think about it once noticed — for domestic animals may be gentle, mild, tamed, docile, trained, broken, unthreatening, and bridled. (Gosh, someone’s been picking from a list of antonyms!)

But does that make them “men”?

“Oh, but it is just a metaphor, imagery …” Indeed.

If people didn’t laugh, it is my fault for not being funny enough.

I make no comment on the ethics of eating people, animals, or animals shaped like people men.

4 hours ago, Joerg said:

If you are into Eastern mysticism, naked Atrilith would have been what powered the earliest Life in the upper Seas

If you are into wordplay, a trilith — indicating luck as the mystical absolute within the cosmos, the highest high god. Possibly not the Yelmite answer to the question why is there something rather than nothing?

11 minutes ago, g33k said:

The Morokanth Mother is... a Mind-Flayer??!?

With its head on backwards. I had the same thought.

We think of the gods as expressions of the runes, as having essences defined by their runes.

But maybe this is wrong: perhaps runes belong to religion, not divinity: we approach the divine via the runes — the runes are our path to god, not the destination.

That is why the warm Elmali see where the chilly Yelmalians see only . That is why the broos see where others see only and others might walk the path of — Mallia as life-giving “Yelm” seen by the dark of the Moon.

But then the monotheists will say that all runic paths — that lead anywhere — lead to the one god. And if the gods cannot be distinguished by their runes, who can argue?

The more pragmatic Jrusteli will say that any runic path can be assembled and all lead to fireworks of various colours.

The mystics say that yes, you can walk the runes as you would a path but you are on a road to nowhere, as you should be. For an encore, they will tell you that all superheroes are fools because they cannot even get nowhere, that like the sage Möbius, they tread the same somewheres over and over . In seeking the pleroma, they manacle themselves; in seeking to pierce the cloud of unknowing, they end up back where they started. No wonder they are tearing the world apart in their frustration.

The anthropophagous elf caught red-handed protests her vegetarianism:

2 hours ago, jean said:

It is logical there is a Eiritha-Herd-Man tradition, because the herdmen are, well, herd beasts.

Health warning: I don’t know either, but …

Myths can have that delightful/distressing (your personality may vary) quality of “explaining” what we already know. We know the the sun rises and sets every day, but why? Because the wind stabbed the sun in a hissy fit and then did a deal to bring it back part time. So now we have a story to tell the little ones and a theme for that play we promised to perform every ten years after the plague passed us by.

On the face of it, the Prax survival lottery is an aetiological myth in the same vein: we know the herd beasts graze and or browse and that we exploit that ability we lack by eating them. The lottery gives us a pretty picture to go with that. If the herd men were part of the familiar, natural given to be explained by the myth, they would be the Gloranthan equivalent of gorillas or geladas. (For five minutes it might be tempting to have Gloranthan geladas herded by Gloranthan baboons, but I suspect the temptation would fade.)

But the vegetarian Morokanth seem to be a spanner in the works — if the myth is supposed to tie everything up in a nice pink bow, why don’t the Morokanth eat the herd men? If they “cheated on the lottery”, they didn’t do a very good job of it: they are saddled with “looking after” herds they cannot even eat. If you are a Morokanth who needs a pair of clever monkey hands, just hire a baboon — they are smart and you can talk to them.

Maybe the myth used to work — the human herders herded and the Morokanth minded their own business — but someone broke it. But who would do that? A philosophically inclined Godlearner or Dragonewt who wanted to get the Praxians to reflect on the real difference between human and person and the illusory difference between human and beast? But I cannot see the Godlearners as being that thoughtful or the Dragonewts as being that interested in humans.

Perhaps the real function of the myth is why we hate the Morokanth but think it is OK to eat our cousins. The Praxians “always” ate their hoofed beasts but in tough times got a taste for manflesh, a taste they never lost and felt a need to explain: they are just beasts and anyway it is the fault of the cheating tapirfolk. Perhaps the human demand for herd man meat is greater than previously suspected (by outsiders): the herd men are a cash crop for the Morokanth, that is what makes their manherding worthwhile.

The herd men are 100% man because represents the humanoid shape (e.g. RQ2 p. 57). One suspects that all are , that all animals are descended from Hykim–Mikyh (Waha khans are, they claim), even the intelligent ones, even the intelligent ones who are not human-shaped. Perhaps what makes a beast an Eiritha beast is that it is [a] herded on Prax and [b] eaten by Praxian humans. But perhaps not. Will Praxian humans eat horseflesh? Perhaps it is just a matter of whatever the Waha cult says goes and best not argue with the Butcher.

8 hours ago, soltakss said:

the Golden Age begins with the creation of Aether Primolt, the First Emperor. The Green Age is the stuff that happened "before" that.

I confess that the creation section of GRoY confuses me — as intended, I suppose — but page 6 has me thinking that Yelm was the first emperor and that there were “Aetherial Gods” before Yelm got promoted. Shall we say the job of emperor was created then though the first holder had been around for a bit — as some kind of offshoot or devolution of Aether???

A green age is going to need a source of light even if there is not “intense light … above the Spike”.

Good to know that there is a Theyalan word for prokaryote. Take that deniers of Gloranthan microbes!

4 hours ago, radmonger said:

It is a Chalana Arroy cult secret that the birth of the red goddess was a perversion of a resurrection ritual

I thought that CA Resurrection was itself a perversion — that is what Humakt, Mallia, & Mee Vorala told me, anyway — as it denies the natural processes of decay and recycling. Zombie cults seem cherubic in comparison.

Giving the heavenly bodies personalities and casting their cycles as death and resurrection was a CA public relations stunt, so blame her for the Sun Tyrant and the Malicious Moon — before CA’s jiggery-pokery, they were just fusion fire and rock respectively. The White Lady twists the world into ugly shapes. Never trust a ‘pacifist’ with a psychopathic bodyguard.

Did Arroin truly greet his mother at the Dawn, as the stories tell?

Or did the sight of her son’s torn and rotting corpse drive her mad? That was when the world was remade into its current terrifying form. Arroin has no magic because he is mere matter, a soulless shambling corpse. Would you dare tell CA this — and find yourself suddenly sans immune system, bone marrow transmuted to iron?

If there is a secret to sane ‘resurrection’, it is Gorakiki’s child Scarabaeus Sacer who keeps it. Darkness holds all the secrets of Aether.

2 hours ago, scott-martin said:

2 hours ago, David Scott said:

Dragonewts

This is important.

30 minutes ago, Richard S. said:

I don't think it should be a place anyone should be going intentionally unless they're an elf, a dragonewt, or an earth hero

… or left-handed? I am beginning to suspect one enters the Green Age through the looking glass.

3 hours ago, PhilHibbs said:

What Greg has said about The Green Age is, don't go there. Everything is perfect in the Green Age. We are not perfect. Any imperfection that you bring will destroy the perfection of the age, and it will be YOUR FAULT that that evil entered the world. All you get from visiting the Green Age is blame for everything going wrong.

Well … if evil entered the world anyway, perhaps we should each of us visit the Green Age once to assume our share of the responsibility, rather than letting some other poor schmuck take all the blame. It is our sacred duty, really.

18 minutes ago, DrGoth said:

But what do these clans do for all-clan sacred time rituals?

Well if we take @scott-martin's “a community comes together to recreate their sense of how they're all united and how they all fit together to make a larger world,” it looks like we have at least two things in play:

• what each community member has in common with the others (shared experience): love , death , & the changing of the seasons
• how the elements of the community complement each other (individual gifts): some bringing balance others bringing necessary agitation

You could play it so that the cycle of the year is not raw change but balanced change — one tempering the other, everything in its right place: light/dark, heat/cold, storm/calm — or you could emphasize what the cyclic rotation of the wheel has in common with balanced spinning of the moon.

These are members of the same community, not sides in a civil war, right? So they don’t necessarily see themselves as at war just because their gods are: wouldn’t that show that they didn’t understand their own myths? And what is the nature of the gods’ war? The Godswar was a linear highway to oblivion, a war of final extermination. But the way out was to loop the conflict: not Yelm dies and the world ends, but Yelm is slain every evening and reborn every morning (which is better than 24-hour sunshine, too) — with weekly loops of lunar influence and annual rises and falls of solar and storm power (other elements, too, of course). It is only the crazies who want to have their deities in sole charge of the universe all the time. Rival sports teams need each other, else the leagues will collapse for lack of games/gate revenue. Cosmologically, these people — 7M & 7LB — have a lot in common. Do they really belong to different religions or do they all worship in the church of the IPL while favouring different teams and star players?

Now some will say that the GC was a stitch-up to keep Sedenya out, but one can easily play it that time (and chaos) were necessary for the return of the moon, that the 7 Lightbringers were the 7 Grandmothers. And you could play it that Arachne’s innovation was not to replace simultaneity with linear time but to introduce cyclical time (balanced rotation). So you tell the tales of the turning of the year and of how the spider’s cycles of time saved the world.

And then after sacred time, everyone can start playing up their differences and squabbling again.

That’s off the top of my head as proof of concept. You will come up with something better than I ever could.

18 hours ago, svensson said:

The Yelmalio cult is the DDR [aka East Germany] of Glorantha.

Yeah, but the DDR wasn’t all bad: it gave us the great Zentralquartett and provided a home for Brecht and Eisler. 😉

18 hours ago, svensson said:

They're … highly pissed off that their more relaxed neighbors are doing just about everything better than they are.

Yeah, but being pissed off is its own punishment. Their more relaxed neighbours should just chill in the confidence that their blood pressure isn’t going through the roof. If you let the bastards get to you, they’ll grind you down just as they are grinding themselves down. If you keep a file on the Stasi take care lest you yourself become the Stasi — as Nietzsche never quite said.

7 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

Yelmalio will be off in the corner playing out his queer outsider sex magick mystical romance soap opera.

Or less windily, it is Apollo and Dionysus doing the dance.

(If you don’t think boozy Dionysus is the demon ZZ, you haven’t seen the maenads in decapitation mode. Pop! Spurt! Squelch!)

3 hours ago, scott-martin said:

Sacred Time IMG is a collective rite where everyone within a community comes together to recreate their sense of how they're all united and how they all fit together to make a larger world. For Lightbringer people, this starts with the LBQ and ends with the reweaving of the web of time in the compromise. OK.

Hill of Gold is a solitary ordeal, like initiation. You make a pilgrimage to the hill and you learn from your suffering. You might go and come back in a group but there's a sense that you experience it alone. "I fight," definitely. Fans of the cold sun like to fight like hell.

But how does that "I fight" cross the gap to "we win" in Hill of Gold? Or does it? Does it need to? Maybe this is not the way cold sun people recreate the world and reweave the compromise.

Well, I think I agree with you about sacred time, but that is probably why it gives me the willies. We are all us is fine when it means they are not them and so we don’t have to genocide them, but when belonging is compulsory, it becomes oppressive.

Sometimes the loners will feel sorry for themselves while everybody else is carousing, bonding, and otherwise sinking into the Bork Collective — OK, it was a typo, but Swedish Chef: the Next Generation, why not? It happens. It is boring. We don’t need a Morrissey cult. Let’s move on.

Sometimes the loners will embrace being monsters and go bite someone’s face off. This can be fun. ZZ? Sundry Chaos cults. Maybe Mother Hyena. One way or another, we have this covered. Next.

Join us — any us, but some us: they all have a place ready for the stray, the prodigal — or you will have to be a monster. There must be something else.

When Yelmalio goes off the rails, he provides the possibility of a path for non-mopey, non-monstrous loners. He fights. He loses. He loses power. He gets up. He carries on. He continues to bring light to the world even though he is himself denied illumination — Yelmalio as failed mystic. He hasn’t won, yet. He is a Kwai Chang Caine who gets his arse handed to him every week, but he remains a ray of sunshine, not a Byronic storm cloud.

This is the Yelmalio that never dies, so he is not Lightfore: there is a rod set to rotate about its midpoint; one end is stuck up Yelm’s butt, the other up Lightfore’s; round and round they go, antipodes; Lightfore was a constant in the Darkness because Yelm was dead, unmoving — if Yelm now dies every day, so does Lightfore. I think we have a diagram for it: . But Yelmalio is definitely unbalanced, or at least not balanced by Yelm.

Outsider Yelmalio doesn’t have an equivalent of “the reweaving of the web of time in the compromise.” He hasn’t been taken apart and rewoven, he is the ever lit, the holdout, the holdover from the previous dispensation. He is also Gloriana, the unfulfill'd queen. From his point of view, he is surrounded by zombies and revenants. He is Robert Neville. He is yesterday’s man. He knows no compromise — it is his glory and his limitation.

As time begins, the story is over for most of the gods: they have been sold out by Arachne Solara and are basically waiting in a kind of stasis — or perhaps a tight loop — to be eaten by Wakboth, although most of them don’t know it yet. There are some oddballs: Arachne herself, perhaps; I couldn’t say what truly binds Trickster; Sedenya has chapters still to play out; Belintar and sundry mortal gods-in-waiting. Probably there are more.

I always like to think of ZZ as one of the wild cards: unmoored in time, more than likely the chaos he claims to fight, and slain by introjecting his ultimate enemy, Aether, even before Aether was born — doesn’t seem to have slowed him down any. When the superheated void/darkness met the supercooled cosmos/light, how could they not hit it off? They are both carrying their pain. In ZZ, Yelmalio finally has a zombie who is honest about it — and his Arturo Quire. The perfect deracinated odd couple.

But crucially, Yelmalio’s ultimate lostness is something that plays out in Time, when most everyone else is remade and he is not: there is no myth of Yelmalio’s finding his place in the world, because it hasn’t happened, yet. Maybe ZZ can show Yelmalio the way to illumination (as his black mirror). Maybe Yelmalio can show ZZ how not to suffer from his (laving his burns in cold rays). But these are not Godtime stories, not stories to be told at sacred time. They are rough, tender, personal stories, as yet without ends.

When the cold light people and the hot darkness people move their stories on sufficiently, will that recreate the world, reweave the compromise? I tend to think not. They will find their place in the world — although they had to do it in hard, slow ways — so you might want to say their worlds change in a no-change, aspect-flipping way. But no, the world about them — the worlds of others — will not have changed. No one else will be affected. That would be … crass.

And yet, and yet … what would a world with a peaceful ZZ be like?

So Lightfore can do manly man things with long pointy sticks and argue with Elmal about whether they should enter the gymkhana, but Yelmalio will be off in the corner playing out his queer outsider sex magick mystical romance soap opera. That sounds like more fun, right? No? Just me, then. 😉

I am not sure if this quite fits here, but an article about Mary Renault by Miranda Carter.

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She also discovered the Ashmolean’s collection of copies of Greek antiquities, recently acquired by its keeper, Sir Arthur Evans, excavator of the palace of Knossos. Several objects, including a fragment of a mural showing a wasp-waisted Minoan jumping over the horns of a bull, she revisited again and again. ‘He seemed not to leap, but to hang above the bull, like a dragonfly over the reeds,’ she wrote in The King Must Die (1958). She was inspired to write that book after seeing the original on a visit to Evans’s fanciful but thrillingly evocative reconstruction of the House of the Axe at Knossos in 1954.

2 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Your Glorantha may vary, but only a little bit?

23 minutes ago, Rob Darvall said:

Even if he does know he's pushing uphill … Too variant a cult and it'll just vanish.

Umm … [shrugs]