mfbrandi

10 hours ago, Eff said:

The greatest [trick], of course, is when he tells you he can take the blame for your own actions.

“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?

10 hours ago, Erol of Backford said:

Poughkeepsie - interesting name for a place, maybe that's where some Kolati live?

According to Wikipedia:

Quote

Poughkeepsie is derived from a word in the Wappinger language, roughly U-puku-ipi-sing, meaning 'the reed-covered lodge by the little-water place'

Sounds like somewhere Enki might hang out.

6 minutes ago, Erol of Backford said:

Wouldn't they seem odd? Does anyone have a example in Glorantha or not, that is an Urban Shaman?

Does Rachel Pollack’s Unquenchable Fire count?

4 hours ago, scott-martin said:

people decided to promulgate the identification of the "ghost" in the ginna jar machine with Ernalda, and from there since the ghost is also the spider it's a short associative hop to identify Ernalda with the cosmic spider.

[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.

Quote

The six
were together when they reached the edge of
the world where the ocean seeped across the
land. Beyond that place, the lap of cold chaos
froze the very stuff of the world. There, upon
the edge of the cosmos, they discovered the
mysterious being called Ginna Jar.
— GtG, p. 121

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.

5 hours ago, Wheel Shield said:

“403 Forbidden” error message. Was the image removed because of this post?

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

10 hours ago, scott-martin said:

Arguably there is always something funky lurking just below the surface of the rye . . . some purple grain attached to a grain goddess whose name is a secret, some fungus or amaranth or whatever is better to think and worse to eat.

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:

Quote

The bountiful mother of life is the source of all sustenance. Reverence for her should stem from every living creature. Plants and animals, both wild and domestic, are her children.

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.

8 hours ago, jajagappa said:

Looks more like the Water Divination stick

Or — ask any Illusion cultist — a crutch.

2 hours ago, Eff said:

a subconscious hope that by buttering her up she will bless us, or a subconscious sense that if we define her as benevolent, we will find a Glorantha that has a gentle or benevolent metaphysics

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.

3 hours ago, scott-martin said:

"We" tend to imagine her benign for some reason, perhaps reaction formation on display.

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

7 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

KL, the goddess of the blasted people forced to the surface …


Rashoran. The Third Eye … One of the first things they did was to destroy Rashoran to keep his secret to themselves … Trolls care about chaos and love Humakt.

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?

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

8 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

Now word of god IMG. The relationship between Basko or the shadow-of-the-sun, more conventional trolls and whatever they actually do up there on the wild Koromandol coast remains to be explored by those willing to brave that clearly vaginal "pedipalp" standard.

As we know, "documents and oral memories from storm, darkness, and earth cults" converge around the conspiracy of chaos that hatches the devil. And yet here we have an ernalda operating in a different triple act, assisting / facilitating a different birth. Maybe for some people the real devil was time. Maybe for some people the handmaid or "mistress" or midwife isn't the transcendental figure they've developed in Dragon Pass while a dark-derived bug goddess takes the central role. 

For that matter the two dads may or may not be the same figure in different phases of his career or seen from different perspectives. But this is probably veering into the dumb theory zone.

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.

3 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

that clearly vaginal "pedipalp" standard

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

20 hours ago, John Biles said:

she seems pretty strongly linked to time to me

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.

2 hours ago, French Desperate WindChild said:

but i like to understand in any post (mine or other's) if what is said is from the books and  canonical

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.

8 minutes ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

i never want to see vaginal pedipalps ever again, David Scott

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. 😉

18 hours ago, Agentorange said:

I think The Well of Daliath has Esrola or Ernalda as Mahomes mother ( Ernalda rings a bell )

The Well has:

Quote

Amongst the Orlanthi, she is one of the traditional household goddesses who are the daughters and handmaidens of Ernalda — Mahome, who tends the hearth.

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?”

18 hours ago, soltakss said:

Personally, I like the idea that deities just spring from another with no other parent.

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

17 hours ago, soltakss said:

This is not a popular view.

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

17 hours ago, French Desperate WindChild said:

why do some of you consider Satyr or other beastmen as spirits ?

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.

41 minutes ago, David Scott said:

Ernalda now released helps Arachne Solara birth time (as the midwife of Time).

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:

Quote

Ernalda has always known how to spin, measure, and cut the threads of Creation … she rewove the tattered cloth of Creation and created the Compromise that saved the world and ended the Great Darkness.

… 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.

1 hour ago, Joerg said:

On the whole, "When did Ernalda die?" is a trick question. After all, "She is not dead, She is sleeping."

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

14 hours ago, soltakss said:

Aether Primolt's power and used it to bind and enslave Lodril. That is pretty powerful to me.

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.