mfbrandi

Who invented the runes, at least in their written form? Evidence begins to emerge. And we all remember the form the man rune took for a while.

We like to go on about Lodril as an agricultural deity, but I suspect that his remit is wider. For the farmers, he is responsible for canal irrigation, right? One suspects also agricultural tools. But he built the Gods Wall and invented the cylinder seal, IIRC. So Lodril and family should do for crafting and engineering when no other cult seems right. If he is not mentioned much, it is because he is disdained by Orlanthi as an embarrassing “foreigner” and rival whose innovations were “not invented here.” Spot on, I think — even when your god is the patron/inventor of your trade, don’t suppose you always need spells to conduct that trade.

Trees have spirits. Rocks have spirits. Rivers have spirits. But we don’t say that in Glorantha, there are no trees, rocks, or rivers. Diseases have spirits. But we do tend to say that in Glorantha, diseases are caused by spirits, not microbes. Let us just bite the bullet: Gloranthans don’t have germ theory — @Joerg can jump in and correct me about that! 😉 — but Glorantha has viruses, bacteria, and microscopic parasites; it is just that like every other damned thing, those entities have spirits.

Dragon —> Dinosaur —> Chicken Phylogenetically, one suspects pretty much everything in Glorantha is a dragon. (OK, maybe I exaggerate.) When Godunya says “I am a chicken but not a dragon” you should be afraid, very afraid.

On my bad days, I think “imperial Kralorela” is a collective illusion, maintained in a Berkeleyan act of will by scholarly exertion. — (with apologies to) Prof. Dennis Grafflin of Bates College

Does a hidden question deserve a hidden answer?

Well, that is an ouroboros that doesn’t soft-pedal the sexual reading of the symbol. Do you think that is why no one has picked this one up? The wikipedia page suggests ideas: used in the synthesis of benzene (or other alchemy); a Mostali religious/cosmological symbol (pantheism: “all is one”; cycles of destruction); possibly a calculating device — big numbers at the head, small at the tail, but how does one operate it? One reading of the snake swallowing its own tail is Wakboth in the net, so maybe some magic to do with time and/or binding chaos. In its sexual reading, the arm-ring symbolizes posting on web forums.

I think perhaps you malign the godlearners. If you are a scientist–sorcerer, which of these sounds like Maximum Godlearner Fun: do a bunch of experiments — bypassing the ethics committee, if necessary — and grope towards something that at least seems to work, or download the answer and avoid years of late nights in the lab? The answer has got to be the first option, right? They don’t want a hotline to the “truth”; they are all about the process, baby.

To me, this suggested a variation on the familiar creation myth in which a monster/giant/dragon is killed and dismembered to create the world: Arachne Solara/Glorantha uses all of her body to create her web/the cosmos, that is why Glorantha is dead and Arachne Solara is only a ghost. The act of creation is looped, echoing, and/or eternal. This primal act of creation is sometimes seen as the utuma of the cosmic dragon, sometimes as the devil causing the Spike to explode killing Glorantha, sometimes as the ritual of the net. Finally, we get to lean on the non-sequential nature of Godtime. It is all the same event. The world is the flesh of the devil. And if the world, the flesh, and the devil are the “implacable enemies of the soul” then it is just a matter of the remnants of Glorantha fighting it out: dead lizard bits versus ghostly arthropod. A Gloranthan only ever fights herself. But if you are cosmos and void, a little solipsism is forgivable. But what kind of people would tell the story this way? Are they a gloomy lot, or the cheeriest inhabitants of the lozenge?

Or more directly: https://stablediffusionlitigation.com/. You can sign up for updates about the case there. Matthew Butterick is one of the good guys and a skilled communicator, his Practical Typography should be required reading for anyone untrained and thinking of self-publishing (on JC or otherwise).

So the ghost of the Cosmos cannot hope to be more than the bits of ourselves that we have lost down the back of the sofa? That is some anthropocentric universe. (Alternatively, maybe, she has stored our lost dreams, love, and hopes in her void, but who knows what if anything she will do with them? Perhaps she will eat them. Perhaps she will use them to decorate her web — as lures? Perhaps she will return them to us when we most need them … or most need to avoid them. Perhaps she has forgotten them, already.)

Posting esoterica is itself just a game, you are right. But I long ago fed all my slaves to the Bat; it’s the abolitionist in me. And — whisper it — I am not the only one to simply make it up as they go along. If I ever claim to be the canon police and to have had hadith dictated to me by the shade of someone who once sat next to Greg Stafford, just take me out and shoot me.

In those parts of Glorantha that have no winter to speak of, does she die at all? Have the people who live there even heard of her?

Sounds like the marketing slogan for an ambitious Tibetan cult.

“Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine … My sins my own, they belong to me” kinda thing? Every teenager’s credo, because we were all arrogant pricks back then. When some goody-two-shoes claims to have perfected this illusion through long hours of work in Daddy’s basement, we don’t really like it. But when the Devil (Wakboth, Kajabor, whoever you hate when you look in the mirror) -> Demon (ZZ, Azhrarn) -> Trickster (Wile E., Loki) attempts this bit of business, it has a little more charm, no? Focus all the hate and filth of the world at one point and maybe we can work miracles. And maybe the boy understood this; maybe we misunderstood the radicalism of the descent into the world, of the word made flesh. Why this is Hell, nor am I out of it. You are not just pinning a paragon to a plank, there’s more … even if it is a “trick”. Of whose party without knowing it? See the trouble with Yeshua is he went with the wrong agent. “Stick with Judas,” I said, “Ignore those other schmucks — in the long run, they’ll just make you look like a schmendrick.” Did he listen to his Uncle Lew?

According to Wikipedia: Sounds like somewhere Enki might hang out.

Does Rachel Pollack’s Unquenchable Fire count?

[This is just a personal view. Few, if any, will have sympathy for it, but here is my plea …] Of course people will tell different stories — seeming to imply a different nature and character — about what is ostensibly the same god. Some bright Gloranthan spark probably thought supreme nature deity = Ernalda, supreme nature deity = the Sunspider, so alakazam! -> Ernalda the Magician. That is fine as far as it goes, I guess, and maybe we can even tell the “she gets Orlanth to kill Yelm” story in a way that doesn’t have her pouting and batting her eyes at the big O. But really, why bother? If you want AS to be behind the killing of Yelm — it is all part of the grand plan, after all — you can have the Spider manipulating/sock-puppetting Ernalda, or as noted you can motivate the killing without bringing the green one into it, at all. You can motivate it from ego or politics or likely half-a-dozen other things. And let’s face it, the actions in a myth don’t have to make much sense psychologically, anyway. (The end result should resonate, but I reckon that probably doesn’t need well-motivated characters. Certainly not deep ones.) I have this horrible feeling — please let me be wrong — that the creep of Cosmic Girl Ernalda has something to do with some earthman’s need to have the perfect bountiful wife also secretly be the monstrous manipulative spider who is eventually going to toss all her husbands to Wakboth as snackfood. (And there is a non-zero chance that Wakboth is an aspect of the Spider.) “My wife, she caught me in her web, and she sucked me dry.” How absolutely charming! Now, the implacable Spider playing her cosmic game, to whom even divine Kings and Emperors are less than pawns — her I like. (There are other, smaller Arachnes. I like them, too. They needn’t trouble us here.) And she is a plausible nature goddess, who would happily extinguish all of our culture if it got in the way. But Ernalda — who represents culture: agriculture, marriage, feeding the tribe — seems to represent the domestication of nature, i.e. to be its enemy. Frankly, she gives me the dry heaves. Do we really want to yoke them together as one god? The divine Spider slumming it with the endoskeletal softbodies? I can see some Ernalda cultists would want to tell it that way, in the long tradition of latecoming gods claiming the status, power, position, and even identity of their predecessors. Plus, out of fear, they might want to put a friendly green “human” mask on a sometimes hostile eight-eyed, hairy-legged cosmos. They might want to see it that way, but do we want to inhabit their POV? I don’t, but I have a weak stomach. “But Ernalda needs toughening up, lest she seem like a manipulative housewife.” Maybe, maybe not — I am probably not the right person to judge, as I would happily see the Spider squish her with a rolled-up newspaper (even before the 3rd Age endgame). But if she did, there are all those other earth goddesses — some of whom are quite tough already — and we could make a case for them all being aspects of her, the owner of the earth rune. It is almost as if, having “outsourced” her less “attractive” aspects to “sisters” and other “relatives”, her only move to seem important again is to claim to have secretly been the supreme being all along. But it is late, I am not going to get any more coherent, and I should probably have stopped some time ago. I did say I would scream. I think you were testing me. 😉

If Belintar’s theory is right and Ginna Jar is the ghost of Ernalda (and if time works before Time and if time travel doesn’t), then Ernalda must die before the other Lightbringers meet Ginna Jar. And if someone suggests that Ginna Jar is Arachne Solara and the ghost of Ernalda, I shall scream. That’s a lot of ifs. The Spartans wouldn’t be impressed. And given how unobservant the big O. is (and how happy to monologue into empty space), his wife might have been dead a long time before he set off on his quest.

I have seen that error, too, but try the same link again — the picture is there. You have probably seen it before, anyway.

See, ergot and midwifery I get. But fungus seems to point us back to a Darkness midwife. And where there is Darkness, you are sure to find Light–Fire. Is the Aether that burns its way out of Darkness really St. Anthony’s fire? (Anthony … Arachne … but no, that is for another thread.) If in humans ergot can both cause and prevent miscarriage and through vasoconstriction remove limbs, is it too much of a stretch to have it involved in the curse of the kin? Ernalda in the Well: But unless Flamal — a piece of amber preceding trees? — is her child, she doesn’t seem to be an ancestress of Mee Vorala/fungi. As Zorak Zoran ate Flamal, one wonders whether either (a) ZZ is the “true father” of Mee Vorala, or (b) it is through being consumed by ZZ that Flamal got to “mate” with Dame Darkness (ZZ’s “sister”). Either seems to point to ZZ as the author of his own burning/ergotism. Ouch! When the “dead” gods get up and walk toward the Dawn, are they animated by Mee Vorala? We have had zombie ants here before, but their time underground suggests drugged-up periodic cicadas.

Or — ask any Illusion cultist — a crutch.

But surely it is the Orlanth–Ernalda complex — like us but more annoying — that we seek to butter up. That is not religion — that is toadying and politics. Arachne is a superpowered spider — possibly she was bitten by a radioactive high-school student — who sometimes dresses up in a human costume. You cannot deal with fate. Fate doesn’t care. Fate has its own agenda. She gave us back the sun (her — just ignore the blonde beardy guy) — yay! — but she also gave us time (which is the devil and also her), and time will eat us all — also yay! but with a little trepidation? And in time, the sun may eat … everything? The Sunspider giveth, and the Sunspider taketh away. Suns burn planets and spiders suck out your insides. She has destroyed civilizations and will bin the rest of the gods. Blessed are the ways of the Sunspider. That’s a proper god. Who wants a god that’s like us but blown up to the size of a barrage balloon and painted blue or green? That’s not a god, that is a bouncy castle.

I imagine her as exactly as benign as Zorak Zoran … and I like spiders.

All that stuff about chaos monsters and unholy alliances? Just window to confuse the enemy radar. Dropped by people who want a moralized cosmogony. Do we want to hang out with those people? Hell, no. But drilling holes in generous Chaos/Rashoran/Huntun … and Chaos died … this we might believe. And then we are cooking with plasma. Drill a hole in Zorak Zoran and he “becomes” the devil, time, and the people — the beautiful, burned, im/perfect people. Wakboth–Arachne = ZZ–ZZ, of course. I do like — I love — your idea of the Uz as the burned people who must colonize the surface world after the holocaust of creation, of Light burning its way out of Zorak Zoran. Of course, the burned people are in some sense the children of ZZ, the monster who burned himself. And if the people are sometimes tempted to see the Light as a purely destructive, external force, XU knows that it came from within and that although it can destroy, it also sustains — and brings or accompanies change, frightening change. If she is sometimes a pot, she is an urn of cremains (symbolizing her protection of her poor burned brother). We know that creation is ongoing through the Third Age and the Hero Wars and that in the Fourth Age, only one humanoid race has any significant presence — only us. But who are we? Argrath is Arkat. And Arkat was a troll. The sentimentalist in me wants to think that the enlo inherit the planet, but following Planet of the Apes, it could be a mixed community of trolls and kin … with some herdmen as a reminder of the humans who blew the whole thing up (who were the final expression of ZZ’s act of creation?), perhaps. (Or possibly Genertela is a wasteland, repopulated by Uz from Pamaltela; presumably, they — like the enlo — are better adapted to light and heat than other trolls. There wasn’t an illiteracy plague, just a period where Pamaltelans had to excavate and decipher what was left of Genertelan literature.) Trolls worried about chaos? They want to take a good look at Zorak Zoran. Fire, violence, hate, zombies, … You can try to externalize all the scary stuff which will bring an end to everything, and you can call it by a hated name, but there is no “them”, because we are all Uz — even the scary monsters (Yelm) and supercreeps (Orlanth). And if many trolls have a hard time taking a look in the mirror, they are not really built for it. If trolls love Humakt, it is because they are realists. One day, it will all be over — not pretend ‘happy hunting ground’/‘Orlanth’s feasting hall’ over, but really over — and they have made, or are trying to make, their peace with that. Written on Humakt’s sword: TERMINUS EST. The XU theologians suspect that when we are all long dead and the universe has settled down as near to its zero state as it will ever get — and her brother consequently has a moment’s peace — some random fluctuation will cause the void to explode into flames, the universe will be born again, Zorak Zoran’s cosmic torment will return. It is said that ZZ is the god of torture, but it is less often said that it is Zorak Zoran who is the eternal torture victim. But he is a good Nietzschean and has said “yes” to this eternal recurrence. The XU theologians ask: if the child returns to Omelas to be tortured voluntarily, life-after-life, would you still walk away? ZZ’s suffering made me think of Prometheus and Loki — with XU as Sigyn? — and looking at Wikipedia’s section on the etymology of “Loki” turned up some happy accidents: flame (not really); “things to do with loops (like knots, hooks, closed-off rooms, and locks)”; “harvestmen, modern Swedish lockespindlar ("Locke-spiders")”; “Hence, it is natural that Loki is the inventor of the fishnet”. Sometimes the universe is generous. And we creep — by fractions of a millimeter — toward a semblance of coherence?