mfbrandi

The natural enemy of the moth, so the pair represents self-overcoming, like Arkat–Nysalor off in the corner screaming “Gbaji” and beating himself up?

Bat, hummingbird, pterosaur (just me), hummingbird moth, or hummingbird hawk-moth, or … Whichever it is — what day of the week is it? — isn’t the steed of the Goddess just an aspect of the Goddess herself, rather than a fully distinct entity? Multiplicity is to be expected. How long is any true bat’s tongue? But a hummingbird’s is long, as is a moth’s proboscis, more in keeping with familiar iconography and all the better for slurping up souls as if they were nectar. Trochilus pella or Trochilus Peloria? The more terrible the aspect the Bat presents, the more it symbolises the Red Goddess’s ties to the middle world and to power. Don’t think of the Bat being banished if she is starved, think of her being liberated from the middle world if she ceases to commit atrocities. The Red Goddess–Crimson Bat is tortured every time she is fed. The Goddess is like the Legalists’ ideal emperor, nominally in charge but in reality trapped at the heart of the machine. Perhaps the last form of the Bat seen in this world will be something like the final stage of a mayfly: “adults do not feed and have only vestigial mouthparts, while their digestive systems are filled with air” — ooh! symbolic.

When in the 17th and 18th centuries Confucius first attracted attention in the West … [i]t took some time to appreciate that, except for the Mohists, no one in ancient China much cared whether consciousness survives death or whether Heaven is a personal God or impersonal principle, issues of overwhelming importance to Jesuits and philosophes. The attitude of Confucius is that we should not be diverted from human affairs by matters which do not concern us. There is no reason to question that he recognises the sacrifices to Heaven, [and others], as the greatest of ceremonies, harmonising not only man with man but man with cosmos. But for him the value of the ceremony is in the harmony itself and does not depend on anything outside. — A C Graham, Disputers of the Tao (p. 15) Now consider how we view build Gloranthan religion — very Western, very Xtian, very … Modern. No amount of technicolour polytheism will get us off the hook.

In the version where Wakboth comes at stations 2 (empty victory of the RG) and 6 (full victory of the RG), he may stand for nothing more than entering the otherworld (easy — any fool can ‘die’) and coming back (with the goodies = hard). EDIT: Although coming back with the Bat may make the “full victory” over chaos-as-evil ironic and make the “I am the Devil, now” reading tempting. Maybe.

Another reading would be: I exchanged places with Wakboth, and now I am the moral evil of the mundane world [empire, slavery, etc.] and “pinned under the Block” [will soon be reduced to a lump of rock in the middle air]. Then Argrath’s tearing down the Red Moon is liberating Sedenya by an act equivalent to lifting the Block from the Devil. Sedenya’s own illumination was occluded, which is why it yielded power in the middle world. (No, none of this is original, of course — but it seems to fit with both RG as Devil and Red Moon destruction as her liberation.)

Anyway, we drift. Can a shaman act as an intermediary for any god? How far did we get? The god needs a presence on the spirit plane. (Thed, yes. Ragnaglar, the IG, and Wakboth, arguably no.) The shaman needs to be able to frame a contest or deal with the god. (I remain silent on whether this is a matter of scale or subtlety of approach.) Maybe the shaman can deal with a proxy or impostor and still bring back magic. (On the model of heroquests and lesser figures rôleplaying deities.) Doubtless I failed to recall many better points.

And maybe it was only said that she said it. And things done in heroquests may be smaller than they seem — how many ZZ questers have beaten up Yelmalio and stolen his fire powers? It is not so much that they didn’t really do it, more what does it mean for them to have done it, no? A bit like IFWW: did pretty much everyone save the universe alone? But it is not “we formed a massive army we won”. Even the real deal is not as fancypants as people like to make out after they have had the “visitor experience”. To me, it is binding Gbaji — a mere empty shadow of a dead god — that looks like bragging. But maybe it plays better with the punters than “After realising that the demons I fought and ‘beat’ were mere illusions, I realised that I was an illusion too, and I vanished.”

Never read anything by Ken F, but maybe he left ghostly resonances at 19 Gordon Square.

But if we want an explanatory theory, it needs to work for Wakboth, Ragnaglar, and certain other cult-not-currently-possible dead Chaos gods (but not Thed and Nysalor), as some Chaos heroquests do work — take a bow, Sedenya. Against me with my pretend-Jeff hat on, I was reading HeroQuest Glorantha, yesterday, and that seems to suggest Sedenya did encounter Wakboth on her quest, even going so far as to have her say, “I defeated Wakboth and exchanged places with him” (p. 182). (IIRC, Wyrm’s Footnotes #10 doesn’t identify the demon as Wakboth and has its defeat before she binds Gbaji — which makes sense, I think: dismiss/defeat your demons first, then push on to the emptiness of Nirvana.) Although … One way to take the exchange of places is that it reverses her defeat early in the quest, but another might be that she claims her place in the otherworlds by confining Wakboth to this one — that is we have an alternative explanation as to why Wakboth cannot have cult: Storm Bull doesn’t get the credit, Sedenya does, as she stole Wakboth’s seat on the bus. This shouldn’t upset the Storm Tribe too much, as it fits with their narrative that the Red Goddess is the Devil. 😉

Kazoo, comb and paper, whoopee cushion.

I have said it before, but what the hell … for Maran Gor, avant garde gong music. Huge tam tams and such in reverberant underground chambers. Keep away from the raptor mosh pit, though.

Now I am imagining an a party of PCs who are wandering stonemasons who always end up neck deep in and resolving the problems of their geographically scattered client cults. We will start a new trope of hobos on the square. Tattoo of third eye over dividers optional.

The Devil is in the mundane world — oozing evil from under the Block or from every field and particle of temporal reality — so is present in time, sure. Is time or the temporal world, perhaps. It is in the otherworlds that the Devil is — according to this take — absent. To have cult, you need an otherworld presence, right? If you are trapped in this one, no dice. I am not trying to push this view on anyone. I am just trying to make sense of something Jeff wrote. It might not be what he intended, at all. Seems to work so far, but when the decisive experiment disproves it, we can all go down the pub. 😉

So if I have you right — apologies if not — it might not be Wakboth you meet in the otherworld, but you had better believe it is Wakboth or the whole thing might unravel on you. All fine. Isn’t the simplest way to take Jeff’s post that unlike the gods — who are pretty much completely in the otherworld, “locked out of Time” (i.e. out of the mundane world as presently constituted) — Wakboth is completely in the mundane world, pinned under the Block and unable to do anything but poison the mundane world with evil. It is not a view of the world I buy into, but isn’t that what’s being offered? Doesn’t theistic magic go something like this: punch a hole into the timeless otherworld and tap some of that juicy sacrificed POW to produce fireworks? You cannot do that with Wakboth because he isn’t there — you cannot sacrifice the POW, and you cannot reach into the otherworld and let it flow back into this one. Wakboth has no cult, as he is not properly located. A bit like how a living demigod cannot provide rune magic — because they are still of this world? This world is the Devil’s — is the Devil, maybe — so no use trying to work the usual theistic levers to tap Devil magic from some other world. And lest we forget where we are: can a shaman act as an intermediary for Wakboth? The orthodox view — at least as I understand it — is no, for Wakboth has no otherworld presence.

Yeah, the spotted hyena is totally hardcore. I saw a documentary about them many years ago (on a little black and white CRT TV) — BBC2’s The World About Us strand probably, before modern glossy wildlife shows — and just went “wow!” But given their mythic rôle in Glorantha, I wouldn’t make them the insider’s choice of animal companion. (I never liked insiders, anyway.)

I guess — I don’t claim to be any kind of expert — that you do it with proxies, with someone “identifying as” Wakboth, as W his bad self is out of commission. The question then is, who is the proxy if a Wakboth cult is not currently viable? Who plays the rôle of a god besides their cultists? I freely confess that the answer is above my pay grade. (I imagine one meta-reason for a cult of Wakboth being declared impossible is to prevent PC diabolists.) Argrath’s LBQ — like its prototype — is different because at that point the Devil is loose.

Herding? Sure. Hunting? To a limited degree, caracals and (the slightly doggy) cheetahs have been used for coursing, I believe. Think about “alynx” — clearly not a lynx (anomalous, atheistic, amoral, atonal, and other good things), but maybe a caracal, which looks a bit like a lynx with a tail. Leaping 3m into the air to catch birds ( creatures) can be seen as a symbol of Orlanth’s murdering the sun, something of which the Orlanthi are not a bit ashamed. But a drop in dog replacement? I cannot see the point. (I won’t object that it is silly, because then we would have nothing left.) Clearly, I am neither a “cat person” nor a “dog person”.

I have no problem with this — the more views the merrier — but I wonder how it fits with the modern orthodoxy (which I can be imagined to regard with a degree of [complete to taste]). If an encounter is contact, consider: Now remember there is no cult of Wakboth. You can’t contact him as he is dead (killed by Storm Bull) and buried beneath that Block of Truestone. Now I tend to subscribe to the belief that Wakboth was part of the reconstituted mundane world and the source of moral evil in mundane life. But as long as he is imprisoned beneath the Block, that’s all he can do. — Jeff Richard, The Moral Evil of Glorantha If I read that right — and perhaps I don’t — it seems to be saying that Wakboth has no otherworld presence, or at least that you cannot get to him in an otherworld if you are coming from a time when his body is pinned under the Block.° It is tempting to think that if a Gloranthan can tell a story, they can visit that story made solid in an otherworld theme park — that all the stories ever told are there and accessible in an interactive visitor attraction — but that doesn’t seem to be what we are supposed to conclude. What do you think? Would you even meet a Wakboth cosplayer on an otherworld quest? If Wakboth has no cult and heroquesting is not time travel (another orthodoxy, IIRC), then that person is unlikely to be a Wakboth cultist. Could be a trickster trying to pull a fast one on the theologically naïve, perhaps, but then one could call them on it. A sorcerer might regard this supposed unavailability of with a degree of skepticism, “No problem working with or , so it is just a matter of devising the right experiment, determining the appropriate reactions.” Perhaps an atheist would have more luck raising the Devil than a theist lacking a lot of quarrying equipment ever would. Sometimes there are other difficulties with visiting stories. We can tell the story “Kajabor eats some gods”, but part of the story is supposed to be that they are then gone as if they never existed and no one can even name them — perfectly retconned away. But then Voidmouth K doesn’t get to eat them, because they were never there, so what event exactly are we going to visit? And what do we — can we — say when we get back? Of course, if it were only ever just a metaphor … ————————————————————— ° Think of all those fans who have said that Gloranthans know that the gods are real because they have visited them in some otherworld. They cannot say that about the Devil. Suits the Devil just fine. The weight of all that Truestone is kinda comforting … and in time even mountains will move.

I get through a lot of housekeepers that way, but my tiger is thriving on her new diet.

A bit of non-canon but sympathetic text: At the heart of this world were the Runes, the building blocks of Gloranthan reality. Darkness, Storm, Sky. Fertility, Harmony, Death. The two-dozen or so Great Runes defined the pantheons and powers of the gods, explained the nature of spirits, and contained the transcendent essences of existence … “Magic” in Glorantha was how you related to these Runes, and this in turn shaped how you saw the world. A Shaman would see the Runes as great primordial spirits to be bargained with, a Theist would see them as gods to be sacrificed to, and an atheistic Sorcerer would see them as impersonal essences to be studied and controlled. — Andrew Logan Montgomery, Review of HeroQuest Glorantha So maybe: Rune “compound”, spirit, and god are not distinct entities, but those using the different terms view the same reality in different ways. Don’t ask whether Orlanth is a god, merely a spirit, or simply a compound of , , and , as none of these excludes any other. Don’t worry about scale. Don your Western sorcerer’s pointy hat — or your alchemist’s safety glasses — and think that whether you are dealing with a mountain of gunpowder or just a few grains, you are dealing with the same chemicals — the same “impersonal runic essences” and so the same gods or spirits. There is a lot of gunpowder in the world, but you don’t encounter it all at once; it is safe to set light to a small amount of it, and that doesn’t ignite all the other samples, but you are still dealing with gunpowder, the real thing, the whole essence. So a shaman can “encounter” Orlanth, or the Bad Man, or whoever “as a spirit” and beat it in spirit combat or successfully bargain with it — i.e. come to understand its essence — but that is not to say that anyone could stand against the strongest storm or all the winds in the world at once. To learn the magic of something is to grasp its quality, not to overcome everything instantiating that quality. And the whole god is present in the smallest sample, as carbon dioxide is present in a single molecule. Saying that the gods are locked out of time is a Platonic move: you can “bump into” atoms of carbon, but the “form” of carbon is not any of those atoms, nor is it all of them taken together — the Platonic form of carbon is not part of the furniture of the mundane world of time and the senses — and yet, so the story goes, each atom of carbon partakes of the form of carbon. So it is with any gust of Gloranthan wind and . Understanding of the natural world is mystified and confusion ensues as Gloranthan philosophers want the forms/runes/gods to be like and simultaneously unlike middle-sized dry goods, the ordinary clutter of the mundane world. The gods are like people. The gods are nothing like people.

Non-canon alert! (I mean it might still be, but I wouldn’t bet on it.) Hyenas are the dominant carnivores of the wastes … Hyenas have been semi-domesticated by the morokanth, who use them as guard animals in place of dogs. — Anaxial’s Roster, p. 86 Although a hyena is no dog at all, perhaps it is a dog-and-a-half. Unlike the morokanth, the agimori can actually thumb their noses at the animal nomads, and I am sure spotted hyenas would have no trouble keeping up with the people-and-a-half on hunting trips. Just a thought.

Expedition to the Nargan Desert to fetch some immortal giant dogs — steal/trade them from the Agitori? — then a magical ritual to make them mortal enough to be fertile? Sure, the pups will be a little smaller, but …

Bit harsh. Perhaps the image of six Lightbringers with a gap where the seventh “should” be is the truest representation. It is the holes in the world that hold it together. Six is the number of the lozenge, but making it seven by adding an absence points us in the direction of Sedenya and Nysalor … and the very hungry caterpillar. Hail Krarshtax! 😉

But we are always two or three civilizational collapses away from the beginning of time. At least, I seem to remember saying that nine or ten civilizational collapses ago. We Young Glorantha Creationists wave our banner with gusto and irony.

Ginna Jar … may be represented as a ghostly queen wearing rags or as an iconic symbol such as a floating jar, footsteps, or an empty place between other Lightbringers. — Prosopaedia (PDF, p. 46) The ghost of who now? If we are going with @scott-martin’s six-sided mirror — and why not? I imagine a cube of half-silvered panes (or something equally exotic), rather than a hexagon broken into triangular shards — then let us say the image of Ginna Jar is a blank space on the back of the seventh pane. The seventh pane doesn’t exist, and anyway there is no way to fit it into the jigsaw. No mirror will ever reflect the preening Green One back to herself as Ginna Jar (who is so unassuming that she has no reflection). See this as pushing against the Ernalda power grab in which the Big Green E claims to be Ginna Jar = Arachne Solara = the ghost of Glorantha. “And look, I am not a ghost, I am alive. I am Glorantha. I am Cosmos!” The really “big” gods are modest and invisible and/or without cult.