mfbrandi

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.

Maybe this is unnecessary. If you are in Glamour, then you are already in “Faerie” — albeit a heavily policed and controlled bit — and walking away from the town (which you are free to do) just takes you deep into uncontrolled weirdness and danger. To exit into the normal normal surroundings of Glamour takes Lunar magic. Or this is the story that is told, but truly people who have moved to the city stay because it is more agreeable and less dangerous than their home villages. It all comes to the same thing: you can leave, but you don’t want to. How you react to that realization determines the stories you tell yourself and others about your captivity/liberation.

Although I suspect that if Arkat and Nysalor are not in fact one person, they are so similar that feeding Arkat to the Void would be similarly ineffective.

What would this have achieved? If what freaks people out about Nysalor is illumination, would people have ceased to ask and answer the dangerous questions if Nysalor had been more thoroughly destroyed? The genie of illumination is out of the bottle, and it is too late to do anything about that now, no? Even if we think illumination is dangerous and undesirable, perhaps we need to keep asking questions in a free and unpoliced manner. If we don’t, maybe we will all end up as Gark zombies. I imagine illumination and the Void (and so Chaos) to be intimately connected — as I am the one imagining it, it is probably stupid, wrong, and far from canon — and I doubt that throwing stuff into the Big Nothing is an effective anti-illumination method. Being extinguished by the Void is illumination, isn’t it? I wonder also whether the beardy guy hatched from the egg wasn’t a piece of very effective misdirection — not so much the deceiver as the decoy — while we are watching him and wrestling with him, the real work/mischief of illumination is happening elsewhere. Chop him into bits. Chuck him in the memory hole. It makes no difference. “And vines” — who project managed that collaboration?

“I thought Nysalor was just a face of Gbaji, but both Nysalor and Gbaji stubbornly rejected that.” “I thought Batman was just a face of Bruce Wayne, but both Batman and Bruce Wayne stubbornly rejected that.” One person denies wearing many hats, but what evidential weight should we give that? “But it is not one person, it is two!” — If that were already conceded, we wouldn’t need to ask.

Well, it depends what you mean. If we take the divine identities seriously — Kargzant = Lightfore = Yelmalio = Elmal = [a whole bunch of other small and/or cold suns] — then you already know it, possibly in several variants. One starts “once upon a time, Yelmalio …” Any Hill of Gold myth about a little sun is in that sense a Kargzant Hill of Gold myth. If you like, these are the stories with the god name replaced by a variable (story as complex predicate?): if true of Lightfore, also true of Kargzant. Another sense is the events that happened to the god in Godtime. We know them in outline, but bits may be disputed, even changeable. We may come to know the events better — or worse — in time. Finally(?), there is the question of whether we find Hill of Gold-type stories in which the name “Kargzant” appears — especially interesting if told by people who don’t know the salient divine identities. Well, we might find such, but it would be too strong to say we should find them. Worshippers can — and will — have incomplete knowledge of their deities, no?

Zorak Zoran. Yelmalio cannot cook — no fire powers — but Uncle ZZ doesn’t have that problem and is quite the whizz in the kitchen. Surely, ZZ — from his own POV — is always ugly from his burn scars. He can hide them from us, but not from himself.