mfbrandi

Because I am a miserable old cynic, I kick against attempts to run together sex, sexual reproduction, love, and life … … and even the mainstream would seem to allow the possibility of alternative or more capacious understandings of ‘Uleria’. If Uleria is the goddess of love, the broos could probably do with some. If Uleria is the Old Survivor, the cup from which the whole world was poured, perhaps she is the chief god of Chaos.

I don’t know how that stands vis-à-vis current canon, but I cannot see why the Telmori should not tell that story. It is almost enough to make one think that Orlanth and Eurmal are just misunderstandings of aspects of Telmor. Excuse me while I find an appropriate moon to howl at.

Today in Your Dumbest Theory, some of my dumbest biology … Once upon a time — before the Spike exploded — Gloranthans recognised two deities of life: Uleria (mother of eukaryotes) and Mallia (deity of prokaryotes: bacteria and archaea). In the Greater Darkness, attitudes distorted and hardened: although Mallia and their children — and so life — predated love, sex, and Uleria, the very existence of the prokaryotes was denied, and Mallia was anachronistically reconceived as a goddess of death and the goddess of disease — wrong on multiple counts. As a survival of the early universe, Mallia is associated with Chaos, but did not conspire with Ragnaglar and Thed to admit Chaos into the world: the world came from Chaos, has always been shot through with Chaos, and will collapse back into Chaos. Every child of Uleria with cells containing mitochondria (the ‘powerhouses of the cell’) or plastids (e.g. chloroplasts) owes a debt to Mallia and is therefore ‘tainted’ by Chaos. Interestingly, many disease organisms are eukaryotes, children of Uleria: Entamoeba histolytica (amoebic dysentry) and Plasmodium falciparum (malaria), for example. Although syphilis (via Treponema pallidum) may be seen as Mallia’s ‘revenge’ on Uleria. Distortions and echoes of the true story persist in the official version: ‘Mallia was a fertile goddess who … eventually broke from the alliance [with Ragnaglar] … Mallia is pervasive’; ‘[Uleria] may be the only deity of the Celestial Court to survive the Great Darkness, though some believe that that being which is worshipped in her name is only a small portion of the whole of Uleria.’ If ‘Uleria’ is meant to be synonymous with Life, then we may perhaps doubt one or more of these: (i) that the entity worshipped in that name is truly the Life rune’s owner; (ii) that means Life; (iii) that ‘Uleria’ has a stake in ; (iv) that there are no survivors of comparable or greater antiquity. But some sexually reproducing eukaryotes like to attempt to remake Cosmos in their image … and to sentimentalize ‘love’. Perhaps the Uleria cult will have its Monrogh who will ‘prove’ that Uleria and Mallia were one all along, thus ending the small local difficulty. Maybe there was a long-standing scribal error concerning the sense of ‘predate’ in ‘Mallia predates Uleria’. PS: Perhaps vampires like to drink blood because the mature mammalian red blood cell lacks both (Mallian) mitochondria and a(n Ulerian) nucleus; and they definitely won’t eat their greens.

Sorry for any confusion. I didn’t mean to contrast it with the RQG description (which I don’t have to hand). The point was that the players get a short statement, while the characters may get a vision or something requiring interpretation (and certainly capable of misinterpretation). It is not that the character shoots the breeze about attitudes to life with their deity who — terse bugger — speaks to the caster the meagre seven (or ten) words that the GM gives the player. At least, that is how I read “there is always the … chance … that the character will read the signs wrong” — that is not normally how we would describe mishearing (or even, strangely enough, misreading) a short sentence, is it? But I have been wrong before and will be again. What surprised me rereading the spell description after a long time is that it doesn’t say what you get for your money: you don’t get information about the future; if the roll fails, the answer is misleading; but if the roll succeeds, then what? What relation to the truth of the matter or the god’s belief about the matter (which may of course be false) does the god’s answer bear? The spell description doesn’t say. My guess is that the idea was that the spell was a way for players to get facts out of the GM.

Oops — sorry. Didn’t mean to pass off your own idea to you! Is pursuit of power — enough power to stand a chance of killing a Devil able to gobble up most of the gods in short order — usually all-that rational? Even if some aspect of the result is agreeable (a safer, thinner world), the whole enterprise is barking, no? I was thinking of storing it up, as in a battery. Taking down Wakboth is presumably not meant to be a small matter, if I have the Gloranthan way of looking at these things right. (I suspect that IRL myths measure power scales with a stretchy rubber ruler, but most RPGs and superhero comics not so much. As ever, I may be way off.) The gods are “real”, but what kind of reality are they? Aren’t we often told that they lack free will — whatever that is — and aren’t we to imagine them as stuck in a Godtime loop “eternally” repeating their mythic deeds? Can they even “see” the world of Gloranthan mortals? I tend to think of a god as a vending machine attached to the game of Operation: if you are very careful, you can punch a hole into Godtime and extract a magical humerus or a cup of coffee that doesn’t taste of soup. For the sake of your sanity, your Glorantha certainly should vary. What determines a god’s answer? Are their answers true and consistent? If they are, how hard do Gloranthans have to work to create religious schisms? I tend — foolishly, no doubt — to imagine that NPC diviners have ways of getting from (dictating to) the gods the answers they want: priest thinks “no” -> god says “no”. I don’t say this to preserve a notion of liberal, tolerant, politically correct gods with unfortunately nasty cults; I am just not sure “what the god thinks” even figures. If we were to look at the RQ2 Divination spell description … … we would guess that the players got a seven-word answer, not the characters — they have to read the signs/entrails/goose flights — and that the status of a successful roll is unclear. I suspect the spell was for the players to get straight answers about “factual matters” from the GM, not for worshippers to doorstep deities with attitude surveys: “On a scale of 1 (coldly furious) to 5 (warmly embracing), Mr Orlanth, how do you feel about werewolves?” I totally get the Telmori-are-people-too thing and that they deserve our sympathy for their curse and impending doom, but what is the motivation for making them non-chaotic? If a bunch of left-handed humans were being persecuted as supposed dragonewt sympathisers, would we immediately reach for “they are not really left-handed”?

I guess this can be looked at as “why them?” or as “why genocide?”. I won’t attempt to say why the Telmori were singled out: others have made a better stab at it than I could, and I don’t really feel like grubbing around looking for reasons to wipe out one group rather than another. As for the other, I will attempt that — with the usual risk of being wrong and/or unpopular. I have a feeling that we are supposed to see Glorantha as a place with a very straightforward magical economy: sacrificing two chickens yields twice as much magical power as slitting the throat of one … and feeding grain to a hungry chicken gets you no power at all. (Possibly it is even grimmer than this, but this will do.) Also: more magical power = more mythical significance. Why? Because we are to think of myth as the actions of the gods — prayer POWered machines — rather than as stories? Another way of looking at things might have the betrayal of a single unexceptional person — or a single act of compassion — as yielding as much magical power, as much mythical significance, as good a story as the skinning of an entire nation. But there is a current in Glorantha — presumably, not the only one, or we wouldn’t be here debating this — that says the bigger, the bloodier, the more revolting (wearing your victims’ skins) the better. In terms of entertaining us and “in world”. So why would Argrath indulge in genocide? Because he is gathering magical power to remake the world — in his own image, presumably. Does this mean he is only “game mechanically” a hero? Not a bit of it — hero: a person admired for bravery, great achievements, or good qualities. It is very much or, not and. Through the magic of selective quoting, I can maybe even make it seem like I am not the only one to have entertained these thoughts, that it is the standard model:

I am just waiting for a notorious group of partisans to suggest that a certain Gloranthan theologian — who we will call “Marilyn” — was clearly a Chat GPT beta tester. And if you consider questing to establish religious truths an oracular undertaking, then — for the brave and the reckless — heroquesting rules drop into the lap. 😉

Try this on for size (it is not holy writ): the self-slaying of Kajabor by Wakboth “echoes” the original draconic Utuma; it is a dismemberment necessary for the “entanglement” of Chaos/Entropy in the world to come in the form of Time. The Ritual of the Net recapitulates, continues, or just is the creation of the world. No wonder there is such a ruckus about which Devil is in the Net. Can we add to this that the notion of Wakboth (the ultimate evil) is the barrier in our understanding between us and the perfect Void/Chaos? So the OG dragon is both the monstrous serpentine Devil and the Void that sacrifices itself — Nothing becoming Something (Chaos —> Cosmos) — that we might exist at all and to which ultimately we must return … until the next (or is it the same?) go-round in the most capacious cosmic cycle. Now I will shake the kinks out of my tail and get back to my levitation practice.

Sure, Malkion as Jesus, but the point was to play up the underplayed bits. Yes, you could say the Westerners are Christian analogues, but they also have colour-coded castes which is a clear reference to the Indo-Europeans in the Subcontinent (caste = varna = colour) … it is complicated, no? In a very rare bit of sympathy for the Orlanthi I wondered whether the Orlanthi people had the relationship with their god (like the Jews, who sort of lost their priests along the way), rather than just their monarchs, illuminated elites, or Brahmins. I was wrong, but I did warn people not to swallow.

Ah, it was just a meta-joke. The original joke was Greg Stafford’s, but I must stress that he was *not* using it to make anything like any of my dubious points. I am sorry my kinda off-the-cuff comment has caused so much fuss. If anyone is interested — and there is no reason why you should be — it was reading the Israel chapter of Antony Black’s A World History of Ancient Political Thought that set me thinking. (Others reading it may just end up thinking that I am crazier than they do already.)

For all its errors, I hope at least it wasn’t that.

Isn’t the simplest answer that it doesn’t? BG’s blood lust was up and the slaughter doesn’t have to be rational or justifiable — and it wasn’t. Whatever one may think of honour being “served by grim, bloody work done in the dark”, this just isn’t an example of that.

I imagined that sensitive soul Zorak Zoran shyly sharing his verse with a few close friends and his sister. Then — seeing his trollish, haunted face — I wondered whether Baudelaire was the poet laureate of Glorantha. Orlanth is to Baudelaire as Crowley is to Yeats?

And it fits right in with Glorantha, where berserkers like Storm Bull and Zorak Zoran are supposed to be defending us from something worse than them (if you can imagine such). If we are going to have gods like that, do we want them all to be “boys”? Sure “women as demons” is a trope that might smack us in the face, but beats the hell out of squishy “bounteous” earth mothers, no? 😉

Nothing of what follows is in the spirit of “I am right; you are wrong” — I am likely very, very wrong, but this is what I was trying to do and why … The bit about Yahweh as storm god was just a lure to get the hook into the fish. I was not trying to hark back to a pre-monotheistic Yahweh. I was trying to pull focus from the god to the religion. It seems to me that there is more to religion than a god’s vital statistics and a list of their deeds. I know that when I was reading translations of the Greek myths as a child, I was left with no real idea of what it would be like to be a practitioner of the old Greek religion. Although it is usual to pitch the Red Goddess as bringing the new thing and the Orlanthi as being dreadful stick-in-the-muds, I was trying to sell the idea of the situation’s being more complex than that: of there being a strand of “democracy” and directness in the Orlanthi religion & society (which IRL may have been new with mono-Yahwism) and of old-school elitism and mediation in the Lunar–Solar religion & state. That this would be reflected in the way the respective societies were organised and behaved. And after all — as @Eff likes to remind us — the Sartar rebels are the Taliban. That whole “project” may have been misconceived — idiotic, even — but that was what I was attempting. Not “if you look at the nature and deeds of Orlanth, you will see they are more like Yahweh’s than they are like those of [insert Indo-European thunder god here].”

Oi! I didn’t mean to cause so much kerfuffle. I was prompted by just having picked up a book on ancient political thought — which links political organisation and cult — and by recent emphasis by Jeff on the non-Chaotic nature of the Seven Mothers: communing with Our Lady of Chaos reserved for illuminates who have already climbed the greasy pole (even back to Gods of Glorantha), but yes, the Lunar Way is more capacious. But I did note instability — because: White Moon cult (the Gully Foyles/Merry Pranksters of Lunar religion?) and presumably other Lunar splinter groups; upcoming Utuma via Shadow — and the chew and spit out nature of my comments.

Presumably the Jungian Shadow is not a person but an aspect or fragment of someone’s mind — like the Freudian id. But in Glorantha elements of the unconscious take solid form and go stomping about the place like the id monster from Forbidden Planet. I told the Mostali not to buy hooky Krell gear from Del Trotter, but would they listen? But does the id monster itself have a Shadow? One is inclined to say that it is not a person and that it does not. One can imagine the conversation within the Nysalor riddlers’ workshop: What is the one thing that doesn’t have a shadow? I don’t know. Is it the sun? No, a shadow is the one thing that doesn’t have a shadow. Because orthodoxy is impossible and Occam’s razor never leaves my wicked left hand, I am inclined to say that Orlanth is Yelm’s Shadow — his id monster; his fears of darkness, disorder, and chaos made all-too-solid hideous blue flesh — and doesn’t qualify for a Shadow of his own. The Black Sun, the Solar Storm, the Howling Interstellar Void — all Orlanth, surely. Not a person. Not a god. Just a part of Yelm’s unconscious escaped and causing trouble. “But”? Because normally a friendly thing like conquering the world wouldn’t be associated with darkness and chaos, at all, right? Or Orlanth is the darkness and chaos let into the world by the ever-fissile Yelm going to pieces. There is no “Lightbringer Quest”, only Yelm integrating his death, darkness, and other “Shadowy” aspects to establish the solar cycle of night and day, rather than trying to be “on” all the time — which was clearly too stressful for him, poor dear. 😉

I read that as “contact this aspect of Orlanth and sacrifice it.” “Ooh, that is a good idea,” I thought. 😉

A storm god, you know, like Yahweh. And I hope it is fair to say that like Yahweh, Orlanth is a god with a relationship with his people, and if you breathe the air, he will let you into his cult. So if you think of the Orlanthi as the Israelites of the Hebrew Bible, it might be productive. In this respect, the Orlanthi religion is “modern”. Watch out for windy prophets and wannabe messiahs — they are trouble. Whereas the top gods of the Lunar Empire — the Moon & the Sun — are rather more distant from “their” people: the Emperor worships and maybe is the Sun but hoi polloi do not (think Akhenaten?); mystics in the religious elite are initiated to the Moon, not Waynetta Slob on the street and not even your average Lunar missionary. The Lunar/Solar religion is “old-school” in that an elite — including the ruler himself — stands between the people and the supreme godhead. But this situation is not stable. This is an attempt at an alternative to the usual explanations: don’t swallow it, just chew it for the bitter flavour (and the psychoactive drugs) and then spit it out.

Or type :20- (e.g. “:20-sub-light” narrows it down to one) and click on the one you want. It took me ages to figure that out — and then only by accident, I think. (But maybe SDLeary knows all this and cannot for some other reason.)

I wasn’t having a dig at you, @SDLeary. I was just owning up to my own laziness in assuming Elmal was in early appearances, which may well not have been the case. It does seem to have been Orlanthi orthodoxy that “Elmal is the Sun” (Storm Tribe, p. 45), but clearly: (i) this has been retconned; (ii) he still seems to have been , rather than . Personally — and this is just me, not an attempt to define canon or anyone else’s Glorantha — it seems more fun if the Orlanthi religion doesn’t try to hi-jack all the big cosmic functions: Orlanth murdered the Sun (the one, the true, the god-damned only sun), who is an enemy god, whose function is not duplicated among Orlanth’s friends and suck-ups, and the Blue Puffer had to get involved in bringing back the enemy sun god, who remains an enemy and the Sun even after the grudging handshake. That is, part of the essential stuff of the universe belongs to the enemy and will stay with the enemy — IS the enemy. So we cannot kill the enemy — tried that: more trouble than it was worth — and we have to live with them. But if Elmal really were the capital-S Sun (rather than the last beacon of hope in the Darkness), why not kill Yelm again? After all, Orlanth would have that cosmic function covered. I think it is a good thing if the PCs have to face up to the fact that some of their enemies belong in the universe and have to be lived with. If the PCs are going to be Orlanthi and Orlanth’s eternal foe is Yelm, then I think it is a good thing if the essential solar function belongs to and stays with Yelm. The enemy is not necessarily wrong, or useless, or morally bankrupt, or unnecessary to the continuation of our universe and our way of life — it is just that we both want the same things (and/or have anger-management issues) and are butting heads. Cattle raiding!

Forget the ‘snake ladies’, the authorial sneering at the monotheistic westerners and dwarves, and the supposed Indo-European polytheism — they are all snow. While reading Antony Black this morning, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the Orlanthi are the spiritual descendants of the ancient Israelites (or Black’s version of them). I suspect others have long had this feeling, and some have spoken it openly. Is this part of the appeal for some — a polytheism palatable to those from the Jewish/Christian/Islamic tradition (including some atheists)? A source of disquiet to others — lacking the ‘gods are the enemy’ feel of Greece and Sumer?

Even having a quick (so possibly insufficiently observant) flick through the dreaded Storm Tribe — a point of maximum deviation? — I saw a lot of runes but no in the Elmal write-up. If Elmal was the Sun, the Orlanthi lands of Hero Wars must have been somewhat chilly.

Maybe Ethilrist likes to tell these stories because they involve someone other than him being the most boastful person in the room. Maybe people like to believe this one because they don’t like to think that Arachne Solara herself was responsible for the Sunstop. But we know better, right?

Although if Elmal = Yelmalio, then there is no question of one god having fire powers and the other not. The one is the other. That is not to deny that some worshippers of the god do fire magic while other worshippers do not. I guess what the Elmal diehards miss is that the Yelmalio cult harnesses the power of refusal, of denial. When the Yelmalians realize that they have long been ascetics in the Sheng style — able to amass immense power through the suffering of the failed mystic — they will be terrifying, indeed. When I hear that the Light Sons have traded Firespeech for silence, I am going to find a deep, dark hole to hide in. Every geas is a gift.