mfbrandi

We think of the tale of the lightbringer quest as inscribing the familiar cycles of day and year into the world–story, but maybe the real point was to exclude cycles — the moon was written out and she was not happy about it. I mean “I will feed you all to the Bat” unhappy. In the moon’s absence, what magic “governed” Gloranthan menstruation? Who was even paying attention? (The Seven Mothers ritual? All a blind.) All that blood. All those moon cups. All those hundreds of years. All … That … Blood! And it all flowed together, and it rose into the middle air. People make excuses for Orlanth who came over all stabby when he couldn’t be boss of everyone, when he couldn’t have all the Lebensraum he craved. But they damn Sedenya who was pissed at getting written out of reality entirely. But is she bitter? Well, she is singing at least: My air will be different my hair and my face You’ll be surprised at all the things I replace I’m gonna change my whole psychology And daddy that ain’t all I'll even find new ways to have myself a ball You’ll find your baby's always fit There’ll be some changes made today There’ll be some changes made

Let it veer. The hole I was thinking of was the one that joined Inside–Yelm and Outside–Orlanth at their foreheads. (The “contested middle air” is mystification and flummery, and saying “Orlanth is not Chaos” is like saying “Sedenya the Changer wasn’t one of the rebels against Yelm.”) Version one of the standard went: … but that was too much. The sun of the Taiwan emblem does look like the gods pulling on the net, doesn’t it? And that is the site of the (re-)birth of the world. The “vagina” that gives birth to the world is the hole trepanned in the forehead — the hole that lets the sun out and chaos in — like Cassandra I cry that ZZ is the mother of us all and XU is the midwife. Is time the real devil? Yes, but time saves us, too: no time -> no sunrise. ZZ is the god of hate and cruelty and will eventually eat us all, but he burned out his brain to “save” the world. Does this make “him” the mother, the son/sun, and the holy zombie? The Alpha and the Omega, the Arachne and the Zorak. (Billy Ockham — patron deity of barbers — hacks away at our divine ontology.) As for “the two dads may or may not be the same figure in different phases of his career or seen from different perspectives”, when we need fathers, this always turns out to be true — in a twisted Heinleinian bootstrappy way … and the father and the mother are the same person, too. There is a line of collapse: polytheism -> monotheism -> pantheism -> mysticism/atheism/solipsism … ’cos a girl must have choices, and they gotta come in threes.

I confess that that other thread had me thinking Gustave Courbet with spiders, but we should all be spared that!

I wasn’t trying to tell David he was wrong (see Ernalda’s entry in the Glorantha Sourcebook, pp. 89–90 for the midwife of Time quote), and of course many “people” in the story are tied to temporal cycles — wind, sun, earth/crops — as it is a just-so story about the origin of those cycles. Nonetheless the midwife bit — that struck me odd. Just a personal quirk, I guess.

Satyrs as nature spirits was canon in Hero Wars days, but it is safe to say that means nothing, now. If I knew what the official line was today, I would tell you — honest! Someone here will know.

It is a hideous bit of iconography. At least a centaur is not subjected to having its human bit appear out of the top of a horse’s head. More dignified to have her appear as a spider mostly and a woman when absolutely necessary (sometimes with extra human arms) — not that kack-handed cut-and-shut. This is the greatest of the great gods we’re depicting here. Show a little respect. 😉

The Well has: So you could say “not every handmaid has to be a daughter” or that they all are (to taste), I guess. And for those who don’t like either, there is always “what do the Orlanthi know, anyway?”

Splitting like amœbae (or amœbae as we used to conceive them, anyway), so we don’t know whether to say parent, child, or sibling?

Orlanth sees the top job and thinks “that is mine by right” — seems entirely in character.

Among other considerations, it used to be the official Gloranthan line (for satyrs) — see above. But that is hardly binding — do what you want (really do what you want; not “do what you want and I will go off in a huff”) — and I am sure an RPG can get along without an “official” definition of a nature spirit, anyway.

She seems an unlikely midwife of time. If I were a spider, I would (a) lay eggs, or (b) call in Xiola Umbar, or (c) do it all with smoke and mirrors. (Secretly releasing darling little Kajabor-as-baby-alien with the advice “don’t eat it all at once or you’ll be hungry again in an hour” — that is the way to start time!) Of course, there is Ernalda the Magician: … but in that aspect, she seems to be Arachne Solara — — rather than her helper/co-conspirator. (Some cult is merely disguising itself as an earth cult … or it has delusions of grandeur.)

The gods who returned at the dawn were all vanity zombies. When Spiderwoman set things straight by providing us with time, the gods were no longer needed. Things had been put on a much firmer footing. But they kept whinging on: “The sun cannot shine without me.” “The wind cannot blow without me.” And on and on. To give the inhabitants of the underworld some peace, the dead gods in their tattered flesh were allowed to shuffle back onto the stage, hungry for brains worship. A lick of paint and a few gallons of formalin and you could hardly tell. But this was never going to work out long term. They kept fighting. Bits dropped off. The mall was no longer a fun place to hang out. You know how zombies are. So eventually they had to be chucked in the skip maw of Wakboth. Welcome to the Fourth Age — just like the Third Age but without the appalling smell. That is what it says in the brochure, or so the nice lady with too many legs told me. I can’t read. She lets me turn the pages and look at the pretty pictures, though.

I am beginning to suspect that Ernalda is really Cthulhu. Same complexion, right?

Because to him Aether is “just another godling” — he refuses to see the big thing as a big thing, so to him it is not: that is his superpower. In us, it would just be willful ignorance, not magic — a source of weakness, not power. That is all I meant. I was just playing with the 3 Curious Spirits “which are illuminated?” thing. AA can bring his benightedness to the surface: “Well, I don’t know nothing about that fancy stuff. Bish bash bosh — job done. Next!” AA as a hypercompetent Loadsamoney. Whereas ZZ knows everything that man darkness spirit was never meant to know and is crippled by it. I am just standing knowledge is power on its head. Think of how solar intellectuals sneer at Lodril, but Lodril the “prole” god gets the job done, while ivory tower Dayzatar is good for what exactly? But as I say, just playing with the pieces — this isn’t wannabe canon.

This is genius. Please ignore everything I say: you have already grasped the situation perfectly. But … I like to think of it these ways: [a] we wanted a story about why the sun sets and rises (other cycles, too); [b] because Orlanth is as oedipal as (as they would say on Fags, Mags, & Bags); [c] if Orlanth didn’t break anything, he wouldn’t be able to claim the glory for fixing it. Look, I didn’t say ‘toxic masculinity’ once, OK? … Oh, bum!

The oedipal son/sun wants to replace the father and ‘marry’ his mother the earth, so of course the father lives on in the back of the usurper’s head. It is the point, right? Cannibalism = introjection — no fork required: use your bloody hands and eat your rôle-model raw. Eat up all your greens brains or you won’t grow up to be just like Daddy. The poverty of the rebels’ ambition! This is why there are so many earth goddesses: otherwise family meals would be just too arse-clenchingly embarrassing, even for Orlanth (who cleaned his plate but didn’t quite understand the ‘your’ in ‘eat up all your brains’). I thought the was a torch. But a torch is useless until lit, and we know what a bum rap light gets in Glorantha. Is it just that no one wants to see what is on the end of their fork? Oh, Burroughs, where art thou? To their credit, the Uz are quite happy with their repast and find the truth even in the dark. Notably, they are not patriarchal. There was a troll psychoanalyst, once, but she went out of business. She was philosophical about it: “We’re just too well-adjusted, I guess. I hear that in Orlanthi lands, the headshrinkers get lynched as chaos cultists. Go figure!” She started treating humans, instead, and that is where the giant centipedes come from.

I wasn’t trying to make an anti-religious point. (Think how tired atheists would be if we spent all our time railing against religion!) I was just trying to draw out a potential difference between swearing an oath (i.e. making a promise) and signing an enforceable contract (i.e. putting remedies in place) — and then point out how an oath spell threatens to erode the difference. My idea was that swearing an oath by [insert appropriate religious content here] showed the seriousness of the commitment being made — someone who swore by that wouldn’t be fooling, they would be fully committed to doing what they promised — and that that had nothing to do with calling on one’s god to enforce a contract. I mean, how arrogant to think that one could command the supreme being to enforce one’s contracts! I am not trying to say that God couldn’t strike me down if She wished to — let us say that She could (because I broke my promise, for another reason, or just because She chose to), that She is no one’s “imaginary friend” but a real force in the world — I still think that when we say “I will do it or God strike me down” we are showing our seriousness by invoking something sacred, not commanding God to get involved in our petty matters. Not everything is about the existence of God. But I have been wrong before, will be again, and may be now. Peace?

It could be that — after @Eff — his heart is not really in his murderous project. (He dreams of a new career in a new town. Ikebana?) Or it could be that if they don’t come back he will eventually run out of people to kill. Which may turn out not to be such a different suggestion, after all: either way, the guy is lost.

Isn’t it safe to assume that people in the present believe their own religion? I didn’t mean to question it, nor to assume they are wrong to do so — although I am not a believer myself — but I don’t think that IRL religion needs the world to be like Glorantha-per-RPG-mechanics. I appreciate that in this forum that may put me in a minority.

I could swear an oath on my signed paperback of The Black Corridor that I might sink to Hawkwind but never Jethro Tull, if that would help. (Of course, it is not signed by the true author, so this is a very slippery proposition.)

Absolutely. It is one of those weird distortions that come with Gloranthan religion. Glorantha seems to be the RPG world for people who take religion — and other “anthropological” stuff — seriously, but the way it makes things “literal” or “real” twists everything to no longer have its real-world meaning. Fun, huh?

Well, I hear that vampires stole his lunch money, too. The deeper reason — not a justification for personality dysfunction, I grant you — is that he is an agent of thinning or of demystification: just as Glorantha’s creation was not done before the Great Compromise, it is still not done as the Hero Wars rage. It’ll be done when all the gods and monsters have vanished and we wake up disenchanted next to Jerry and half-a-dozen used needles in some decaying squat off the Portobello Road. All RPG worlds conspire to the condition of Muzak … of mundanity. It is a young man’s person’s journey to Viriconium/London, no? Not only have the trolls and dragons vanished, but they were never there. The trip is over and maybe we — kinda? sorta? — still wish we could catch a glimpse of an elf in a mirror, but the smell of cabbage soon puts an end to that daydream. And Jerry seems to have stopped breathing. Soon he will stink worse than the cabbage.

There are oaths and there are contracts. OATHS IRL, if I ask some god to strike me down if I break my word, part of the point is that no deity will in fact strike me down — that kind of thing doesn’t happen around here and it never has — but it is a way of asking to be taken seriously. This is a game for trustworthy people, or at least it is a game of trust. (Honour? I’ll leave that well alone. Sounds like The Godfather.) CONTRACTS At least one of us is a rogue, so we put a mechanism in place to ensure that god or no god, if I break my word I will be struck down (or you will get the other agreed remedy for me being such a rat). This is a game for people who — perhaps for very good reason — cannot trust each other (though they need to trust the enforcement mechanism). Doesn’t the oath spell reduce making promises to signing a contract? Seems a shame. However, I do quite like the idea of those who take oaths to Humakt being so trustworthy that no one really knows whether the spell has any power. Is anyone’s Glorantha like that?

I don’t care about Argrath as a person and I don’t care for his little Oregon militia human-triumphalist speech after the great god munching, but blow it up and see what happens next, you gotta love that, right? I guess I spent too much time with revolutionary socialists who liked to say “it is not for us to know what life after the revolution will be like.”

Fair enough. And we can all nod along with Muzak Harrek as he tells us about his woeful alter ego. Sounds like Trouble on Triton. As a little kid, my idea of a man was Roddy McDowall, Kenneth Williams, Hugh Paddick, or John Inman. I’d have killed to have been any of them. But even with that early suspicion of hypermasculinity (and even the common-or-garden sort of masculinity), I found there was still plenty of scope for dysfunctional behaviour. 😉