mfbrandi

Presumably, Yelmites and Malkioni (and several other cultures) have no truck with this “Young Glorantha nonsense”: if Zzabur is 5000 years old, then time didn’t start 1600 years ago. Sequence in Godtime and entities straddling the no-time–time boundary are problems for the Young Glorantha theorists. I wish them luck with it. Maybe their smartest move would be to say, “Myth isn’t history, and when we say ‘A long time ago …’, we are just articulating truths about the forces at work in the world today — and every day — and you shouldn’t expect to dig up evidence.” But then some Smart Alec will say that they are not mining metal but doing battlefield archaeology. We just have to shrug and move on, as we are never going to get a satisfactory explanation. Do we really need one? (Don’t try to keep the whole picture in mind at once, and maybe your head won’t explode.)

Over in the Thanatar and Krarsht in the Lunar Empire thread: It always seemed to me that Time — the essence of the Compromise — was both the ostensible domestication of Chaos and the resolution of the Schrödinger’s rats’ nest of Godtime. In Godtime the Sun and the Earth are both alive and dead, but in Time these are resolved into cycles: the Sun is alive in the day and dead at night, stronger in the summer, and weaker in the winter; the Earth is dead every winter and reborn every spring; und so weiter. (Pamalt is the Earth deity who didn’t (and doesn’t) die “because” Pamaltela has an equatorial climate, presumably.) But the world of Time is a world of entropy: the world will thin, and the world will run down — “Ev’ry man, master, sir, is destined to eat ’isself”. See this as the eventual triumph of Kajabor or Krarsht if you like (or Wakboth if you must) — possibly heralding a new cosmic cycle of creation of the universe from Chaos/the Void. If we are lucky, we live in the Goldilocks Zone: the Godswar is over, the big magics are played out, and the “superheroes” have done waving their weapons (causing all the “little deaths” of the world), but the final universe-ending apocalypse is still a way off. There are little cycles and there are grand cycles. The little cycles don’t repeat exactly across the bigger cycles, and they need not sync up with each other. We may be tempted to paint cycles of creation and destruction as “a Chaos thing,” and in as much as Time is a Chaos thing, this is correct. And the poster girl of “Chaos itself is not the problem” is pally with the mother of Time and has the effrontery to die and be reborn every week just to rub our faces in her Chaotic nature. But the Earth dies every year. And the Sun dies every day. So why is the Moon a problem if they are not? Is this just a case of “I am Stormy, you are Disorderly, but she is Chaotic”? The Great Compromise is the compromise of creation (being) with chaos (non-being) and it is a necessary part of the making — and unmaking — of the world. (Alternatively: Godtime is a fairy tale and the Great Compromise/LBQ is just a neat little aetiological story to “explain” the observed facts of cyclical and linear time, with apocalyptic undertones to keep it spicy.) PS: If this seems like polemic, I hope it is at least friendly polemic.

That you will become the devouring devoured — Ouroboros — that is the cultist’s temptation. And that just might bear some resemblance to the plan of Krarsht herself.

If information wants to be free, it also wants to be expensive: Krarsht has a kind of internet, but it is powered by blood sacrifice; I guess Thanatar is more sneakernet with heads as portable hard drives (but I haven’t checked the CoT write-up, so I may have misremembered). It might be fun to play these cults as essentially into information for its own sake (albeit gained or transmitted at horrific cost), rather than as a source of power — but always having to fight their own “corrupt”(!) elements who want to drag things down to politics or cash. Fanatical Lunar spies in some Void-oriented cult have a one-use spell (or mystical ability) — call it “memory hole” or “send to /dev/null” — which can only be cast on the caster, is permanent, and cannot be dispelled: if a trigger condition is met, their brain/memory is wiped and all their POW, INT, and magic is permanently destroyed (Kajabor style). If you are feeling flamboyant, have all information about them erased as well: their captors cannot even remember who they have caught. Of course, this kills the caster and removes any possibility of an afterlife or reincarnation. Mostali and Malkioni are sure it violates any number of conservation laws, so their official line is that the spell doesn’t exist. Sometimes, cyanide in a false tooth is not enough.

I like this from the original CoT write-up (p.85): In Lovecraftian fashion, we can imagine the aims and understanding of the Krarsht cult have very little to do with whatever-the-hell Krarsht herself is up to — she is not a god bound by the Compromise and shaped by her worshippers’ needs, she is an independent thing from the Outside with her own unknowable agenda. Well, unknowable except for the fact that she probably wants to eat you, but you are OK with that, right? Wonderful! As a chaos god who balances opposites, parallels Arachne Solara (i.e. she is possibly the greatest of all Chaos entities), and with Death vs. RG’s Life, shouldn’t we expect Krarsht to pop up in a very different context somewhere deep in Lunar religion? If she parallels AS, she also has something of Kajabor about her: so far Arachne Solara has eaten Chaos/the Devil/overreaching sorcerers/cocky gods; perhaps Time ends when Arachne Solara/Glorantha is eaten by Chaos/Krarsht. Ending all cycles, or just taking us back to the beginning again? Whatever the truth, there should be secretive, half-mad Lunar theologians worrying about the possibilities. Including the possibility that we have all been very bad at counting legs.

Personally, I think I would run with this: … just ditch all the cod Japan stuff as ignorance and rumour, and make something up from scratch, but if you want to stick closer to canon, we have a very brief description of trade in and out of Vormain in the Guide (p. 470): The Tsankth pirates’ magic suggests items, for example: barracuda-skin slippers — walking on water enabled, but regular blood sacrifice needed or they will fail at just the wrong time arrows of binding — once the point is embedded in a ship’s timber, the ship is held in place in the water (single use) … but if the pirates catch you with their cult weapons, it won’t end well. The pirates might also run drugs out of Mokato: Running slaves is icky and dull, but maybe some magical shape-changers want to go west to cause trouble, attend a trickster convention, or flee persecution, so some kind of people smuggling: I would retcon away slave bracelets, but if you want them, presumably the export route goes via Vormain: Grave robbing and temple plundering are more fun than slave bracelets, so items stolen from the Golden Temple Hall and smuggled out of the country: … gotta be nefarious magical uses for mummy dust. Stealing a god might be trickier.

I have started a fake hyena skin racket for middlemen who want to drop out of the rat race — there is a secret drop off point for all that deep desert kit they don’t need, and I have a cousin who will sell them a new identity for a new town (and hum Bowie tunes while doing it).

My apologies. I meant it in this sense: … rather than this one:

That contradictions can be true is just that, a shibboleth — it is not true (in/of Glorantha … or anywhere) and it is not useful (to the players … nor seemingly to the Gloranthans). The real-world equivalent has a function: to stop the rival believers disemboweling each other, which is always an awkward moment at a dinner party. None of us wants to see that. We would never get the stains out of the carpet, for one thing. But that makes it neither true nor intelligible, just — in some limited circumstances — useful. This doesn’t work in Glorantha: however “liberal” or “inclusive” the metaphysics behind the theology, the opposing sides will go to war, anyway: ORLANTHI DRUNK A: “If all the contradictory accounts of the doings of the gods are true — and they must be, as Orlanth told me so in this very bar — why don’t we just pay lip service to the Red Goddess [spits] and get on with the civilized sport of cattle raiding? It has a body count, I admit, but it beats the hell out of war.” ORLANTHI DRUNK B: “Must … fight … chaos!” [belches and collapses] So why the attachment to the contradictions can be true thing? Is it an embrace of poorly understood godlearnerism? Surely the godlearners themselves were instrumentalists: GODLEARNER A: “If we work on the assumption that p, I can make this EWF fortification explode.” GODLEARNER B: “Yeah, but is it true that p?” GODLEARNER A: “Who knows? Weren’t you listening? I can make this thing explode!” And if next week, GL A has to work from the assumption that not p to get the jelly to set, that’s just fine: they don’t believe either, never mind both; they probably believe that one or the other is true — because, you know: p or not p — but they couldn’t say which; so long as they have an idea of which premises to stick into which arguments, the arguments are valid (though clearly not all sound), and they get their explosion or dessert, then they are happy. Till Arachne Solara (or whoever) squishes them all like bugs.

I hope John won’t mind my quoting him from another thread: If we take the strong version of this account (attributed to Orlanth), which may not be John’s intention — any tale you can dream up about the Godtime is true (however hard it may be to make it have consequences in Time) — then it rather undercuts the claim that Orlanth is taking responsibility for his actions, for he is saying, “It is my fault, but it is not my fault, and it is not Yelm’s fault, but it is Yelm’s fault, and … [ad infinitum]”, no? Isn’t this cakeism? Be careful, as the UK has recently discovered that cakes are ambush predators. Meanwhile, trust the mystics to take the down-to-earth view. That is why they never get invited to parties.

If in doubt, ask Yelm, now resident in a home for bewildered deposed emperors (or at least, every one of them claims to be Napoleon — it is something in the wallpaper, I think): So, there you have it.

I don’t know when/where this originated, but it made it to her entry on the Well of Daliath: According to Beer with Teeth at least, it is not just a pot, but a food pot.

I know it is not your fault, John, but it is a shame that Orlanth’s big idea is flat out incomprehensible: saying that two pasts are contradictory is just saying that they cannot both be true. I know myths are often filled with flights of fancy, but having a character in a myth seem to break the fourth wall to ask us to believe in contradictions seems a pretty good way of breaking the so-called suspension of disbelief. Maybe it is just me. Maybe Calvino could have gotten away with it. Ho hum — six impossible things before breakfast and all that … onward and upward!

Subere and Dehore are depicted as being very satisfyingly dark, and their children — the spirits of darkness — do look like something out of an old Ditko Strange vs. Nightmare strip. So I like it. I do wonder about the Father of Demons and the Mother of Space, though. I know next to nothing about them, but do we need a demon father so close in a family tree to Zorak Zoran? And if Xiola Umbar is a pot, is she not thereby also a mother of space — the void she contains? MoS and FoD as the tantric aspects of XU and ZZ? XU as mortar and ZZ as pestle (look at that club)? Only maybe — I am making this up as I type. (And collapsing generations is a familiar trick, too.) And the pose will — perhaps — make us think of @Eff’s favourite “advanced kink scene” in which also, one might say, a serpent is consumed to creative and world-changing effect. All this talk of snakes and spiders makes me think of Leiber (and so heroquest as change war):

It looks like new (or maybe not so new) canon will be that she is the Red Goddess (or at least the owner of the moon rune, per Well of Daliath trail of the Prosopaedia), and that has always been a thought/possibility: She Who Waits … to be Reborn. However, it has also always been one of the easy 7 Mothers/Lightbringers party game matches to make She Who Waits = Ginna Jar. Ginna Jar = Arachne Solara. If we are ambitious for the Red Goddess maybe she is Arachne Solara, too, or at least a sock puppet of her. They have iconography in common: sunburst behind head, starry cloak, and the Goddess meets herself at least once (Nysalor) on her quest. So the two suggestions are not necessarily exclusive one of the other. This is the picture I had in mind: I don’t recognise the rune (but it is not the She Who Waits rune), but presumably that is Teelo Estara floating above. The face suggests the jar is someone and not just something — no rune because the RG has already been invoked at this point in the ritual? And apart from Ginna Jar, who else gets depicted as a chunk of ceramic and has light/dark balancing properties?

Yes, for which see spin-off thread (of spider silk) here

No, they need to be ALIKE. If you are not traumatised early, you won’t grow up to be a Death Lord, and that wouldn’t suit ZZ (or Arkat) at all. If you join Zorak Zoran, you have to suffer like your god, the eternal burn victim. (Or perhaps he only suffers when the fire of Aether is withdrawn, but to whom can he say that, his sister? Mephistophilis? Yelmalio?)

But if they are protected, they won’t turn into little Arkats, and then who is going to grow up and “end” the world for us?

“She who waits” — depicted as a jar in Under the Red Moon. G = Glorantha. Ginna Jar = Glorantha in a Jar. A funerary urn. Arachne Solara understands creation through destruction — even self-destruction — better than anyone. But the ruling class of the empire probably wouldn’t want too many people dreaming Arachne Solara-sent dreams of the future: Sheng eats the emperor, the red moon is destroyed.

But remember that while AA, XU, and ZZ are worshipped by trolls, they are older than Kyger Litor and not themselves trolls. Their connection with Light/Fire goes back to before Yelm was emperor (or even born). Similarly, Arachne Solara is an old god with Light & Darkness connections (though possibly preceding those runes). So what we maybe want is a connection between Arachne Solara and a draconic power in the early universe. Perhaps we can see the killing of a serpentine Wakboth on the net as a recapitulation of the draconic utuma that created the universe. Perhaps, Arachne Solara sent the first dragon a vision (the ur-dream) of the creation that would come from its dissection and then — having created the duty — assisted at that primal utuma. The LBQ Ritual of the Net and Argrath and the Devil recapitulate and extend this first conscious act of creation — Glorantha in the 3rd Age is still inchoate, still being created.

Spirits of reprisal can be perverse (Chalana Arroy attacking the immune system), and I confess I don’t really like that. Wouldn’t it be better for Issaries’ spirit of reprisal to cause the offender to donate all her wealth to economically productive causes without any hope of seeing a return? Raw greed might take cash out of circulation and harm the holy GDP — unthinkable!

Once it has been exchanged, all money is sacred. Some say that the more a coin changes hands, the more the god is present in it. That coins left in a chest too long are cursed. There is a breakaway sect of Issaries misers who have replaced the mobility rune with a stasis rune. The orthodox of Issaries and Mostal both think this new sect is crazy. Where the sect is taking off, GDP is through the floor. Conversely, there is a breakaway sect of LM dedicated to the free exchange of information. Their temples always have a shrine to Arachne Solara.

I thought you were going to undo my little ramble (not meant to fit canon, anyway), but they go together just fine.

This is very tempting: Gloranthans don’t have a concept like our concept of dreaming, but they do say that otherworld interactions can be carried on during REM and sleep paralysis. However, it is always good to offer an alternative. Try this: Argan Argar is the deity of Wakefulness; Xiola Umbar is the deity of Dreams; Zorak Zoran is the deity of Nightmares. Dreams are visions (so Light/Sky/Fire connection) in the Darkness (where you can only see by the light within). This function of these deities may be hard to talk about: cult secrets; non-Uz shunning ‘trollish’ gods; Uz not being primarily a visual bunch, perhaps they don’t dream, or dream differently — with their dreams presided over by a bat or other ‘sonar’ deity; the proximity of dream to illumination. Behind the three friends, of course, Arachne Solara, who — being a greater god — is not much worshipped. Doubtless you can think up other reasons why the deities with a special interest in dream don’t get much mention in the big public places of worship. Cragspider knows many dream secrets — she is a Gloranthan Sigmund Freud.

Well, the Guide version of the LBQ (vol. 1, p. 123) does give us this exchange: Which sounds like Bill and Ted to me. Maybe they wised up fast, but maybe Arachne Solara sprung something on them they weren’t expecting. I mean, how could they be expecting Time (whose birth was concealed, too)? Perhaps in both cases, the quest was just to end a current situation considered intolerable. An LBQ may have an end — however vague — in mind, but perhaps if it works one always gets the unexpected (not what the audience volunteer wrote on the paper and sealed in the envelope before the magician began to wave her wand).