mfbrandi

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).

TRAVELLER: [Pointing at lake.] “What’s that, my good fellow?” LOCAL: “Why, ’t’s a tarn, mistress.” TRAVELLER: “Zatarn Lake — I must remember that. Thank you very much.” LOCAL: [Shakes head.]

Fair enough. I am not trying to big up the personality of Yelm, although it still may be true that I have grasped nothing, of course.

And yet, we have to reach for an “enemy” cult to illustrate this — which is not to say you are wrong, but to some of us, it does look like he is a politician saying, “Mistakes were made, but I have made my non-apology apology, so now we have to move on. You think I’m bad? Look at that Chaos fiend over there.” The Great Compromise was a step forward, but if Orlanth wants to take credit for it and offer it as his penance or act of restitution, he should be able to say why Time, the child of the top deity of the Balance (AS) and Chaos (Kajabor or Wakboth to taste) — both of which he seems to be against — is the rightful controller of the universe. Can he? Does he? (I could easily have missed it — I am very sloppy.) I imagine that he is instead off cluelessly “perfecting” his performance of Mel Brooks’ “It’s Good to be the King Rap”, but then I don’t seem to have it in me to even try to be fair to Orlanth. And this may be part of why Orlanth grates so: enough already, just leave us alone, and please no more “poetry”. It is like growing up in a country with compulsory Christianity, for a fraction of the population, that will be enough to take against ol’ JC — “You want me to sing a song of praise to your god? What, again?”

That was the feeling I have always gotten, which is why I asked. My instinct is always to slag off Orlanth, but I thought I would give people a chance to argue for another side to the Big O. Well, it used to be Kajabor in the net — and we liked it, and it made sense to us — but there is evidence that new canon is that it is Wakboth: I don’t especially like it, but there it is: our cheese got moved. As for Wakboth’s body being under the block, surely that is no barrier to him turning up in Hell — I mean, that is kinda how it works, right? In the before times, Kajabor was supposed to have gotten to Hell by being killed by Wakboth, no? What is humble about a spider deity? I heard on the radio today (BBC’s All in the Mind) that some scientists claim to have found a REM sleep-like state in a species of jumping spider; I like to think Arachne Solara is dreaming us all. Or who are mere masks or sock puppets of her? She is old — older than the celestial court — and her web stretches everywhere binding light to dark, being to nothingness. Indeed, some form of bagua — the union of opposites sitting in a spider web of trigrams — seems as good a diagram of Glorantha as any: May Arachne Solara bless and protect us!

I do like this, and he is certainly very sorry. I have never seen the “partial success” explained, but it fits nicely with lunar evolution not being done and with Argrath and the Devil being [a] part of the Lunar plan and [b] the next (and possibly final) step in the implementation of the Great Compromise. Because I am an idiot, in playing the popular party game of Which of the 7 Mothers is Which of the 7 Lightbringers?, I never thought to make Danfive Xaron = Orlanth. We have tentative and anyway decade-old word of Jeff that “[t]he closest thing [to Trickster] might be Danfive Xaron”, but I rather fancied him as the dark twin of Issaries (as Yelmalio is the dark twin of Zorak Zoran). Issaries has the runes of Mobility (change, freedom), Harmony, and Issaries (fair exchange, so balance is not really a stretch) and — in his current configuration — DX has Moon (constrained change, balance), Harmony (a straight match), and Death (which — squinting very hard at it — is half of an Issaries rune: the take half without the giving half, ostensibly) — so there is considerable runic resonance. They are both psychopomps: “Danfive Xaron” is fooling no one, he is clearly “Danfive Charon”, even if he says the ferryman is just his mate. If we buy the line that a god’s children are often aspects or manifestations of them, recall this famous bit about Garzeen/Middleman: And now I begin to make sense — perhaps — of @scott-martin’s suggestion that Genert = the Sun, and we have all long suspected that Orlanth = Chaos. (Storm didn’t let Chaos into the world, it was Chaos getting into the world, but as that was good and necessary, I don’t hold it against them. On the other hand, if Storm is just a chaotic feature/crazy immune response (sepsis), that is a whole other more Ragnaglarian story.) If we buy the Rashoran–Nysalor–Moon connection, the Middleman Desert Trek and Bridge for the Seeker Self-Sacrifice projects begin to coalesce, no? If this parallel has any legs, I don’t really want to feed Issaries into the god-swallowing black hole that is Orlanth. I would rather have it that all Orlanth learned is that he could lose — not that he could be wrong — and that it was those around him on the quest who got some wisdom. Digression hidden, because it is a digression:

This I like. I admit that this would show great self-control, but somehow fighting like hell not to die and be tortured post mortem — even though he knows he has to die to carry out his plan — seems more … ‘poetic’? Now we wait for @scott-martin to tell us that the ‘Sheng’ seemingly sprung from that custom lunar hell was really Genert!

Well, that is the version I grew up on, too, except that the nephew is surely Wakboth. Kajabor is the Outside — Chaos taken neat. Wakboth is what happens when illumination goes bad (Ragnaglar & company) or is the universe’s allergic reaction to the Outside — a chaotic feature on the grand scale. Consume evil and “spit” out Time seems to me a very dreary view of the mundane world, but I am assured that is the New Orthodoxy. Ho hum! I think in another thread someone mentioned Orlanth Dragonslayer/Dragonfriend and the dragonslaying as utuma. Wakboth in Argrath & the Devil is portrayed as serpentine, and perhaps we can see the consumption of the gods by Wakboth and the subsequent slice & dice of Wakboth this way: the gods — and the big O as Storm personified in particular — realise that they were the “moral evil” of the world all along (“eaten by” becomes “see that they are”) and the dicing of Wakboth is their utuma, which creates, finally, the mundane world not ravaged by gods and their petty wars (4th Age). Sure.

RED EMPEROR How comes it then that thou art out of hell? SHENG SELERIS Why this is hell, nor am I out of it: Think’st thou that I, who saw the face of Yelm And tasted the eternal joys of Heaven, Am not tormented with ten thousand hells In being deprived of everlasting bliss? Oh, Moonson! leave these frivolous demands, Which strike a terror to my fainting soul.

Or this is the “true” story of Y & ZZ on the Hill of Gold … It is clear that ZZ had to act as he did, but as to why he had to — nothing I could say would be as much fun as making up your own answer.

Heroquesting?

See also Oedipus. Is the monomyth really the tale of the culture hero who does something for the people or is it a “me decade” story of “personal development”? I have problems with some myths of the redemption of the world by (any shuffling of) suffering, death, and rebirth. Some make a kind of sense: the sun dies every evening and is reborn every morning, and so the cycle of days is preserved — but really, perhaps, that is just an explanatory myth. Or in other myths, the god will suffer and we benefit, but the suffering doesn’t cause the benefit (e.g. Prometheus). Or the divine being or giant is dismembered to yield the parts to build the world (and so probably doesn’t come back). Those examples are all fine, but a bald “I suffered and died and returned, so the world is saved, so you better be grateful” doesn’t really cut it for me; it just seems decontextualized, a stranded myth fragment. (I don’t say this is what is going on in Christianity — I don’t know enough about it — but from the outside, it sometimes looks that way: as if only part of the myth has survived.) Wakboth — that retcon still grates — and Arachne Solara save the world; the others are bit players, and their suffering cannot make them more important. If we put Orlanth as saviour aside, how well does the story work as one of personal development? Is the reassembled Orlanth better than the old one? Is new Orlanth sadder but wiser, or just unbearably smug at having done “his” good deed? Or unbearably smug because new Orlanth is exactly like old Orlanth? I don’t know. I do know that Oedipus and Jocasta don’t skip off into the sunset hand in hand.

Good question. How about “recapitulation”? “The myth of [minor god] doing x recapitulates the myth of [great god] doing the same.” Seems right to me … but I am not necessarily a reliable guide.

However, if anyone grasps what the Sun Spider is up to, it is the trickster.

Or “move fast and break things” — Orlanth as Zuckerberg. I can see the Storm King as a tech entrepreneur: gaining wealth, power, and knowledge by doing new things — but maybe learning precious little wisdom or humility.

Well of Daliath: Yeah, typical word game: Umath --> Humat --> Humakt. Maybe “learning better” got shunted off to the storm/not storm of Humakt who is/is not Umath the destroyer and Orlanth the regicide. He is Storm’s conscience, and he knows when a job is only half done. Presumably, at this point the identification of Death and Humakt is complete and every death is Humakt’s work, including the carnage of Argrath and the Devil, which can be seen as Storm’s penance and utuma. And if Humakt’s identification with death is complete, perhaps his staring into the void has gone on long enough for him to realise his identification with Kajabor, too. From Humakt’s point of view, all the resurrected gods are zombies and must be given their peace. The world needs to thin — lose its magic — so that when the sun god returns to its grave, the mundane sun remains to warm us … though it too must eventually die. Don’t say I never bring you anything cheerful.

Gbaji cultist: “Well, yes, I gave you the plague, but I cured you of it, didn’t I? And I brought you to the light. So just be grateful!” Orlanth: “Well, yes, I killed the sun, and my family and I did all that other so-called ‘bad stuff’, too, but I brought the sun back half the time, didn’t I? So just be grateful!” And yet, some would have us take very different attitudes to these two cases. “But, but, but … the Gbaji missionaries haven’t really learned their lesson.” Just so.

Well, he does set out to resurrect the sun, which is the least he can do. But he cannot restore the status quo ante — and he probably doesn’t want to. The murder genie is not going back in the bottle. And if as the Storm King he has to take some responsibility for Ragnaglar, there is the fact that Wakboth is a recurring threat, however big a lump of truestone was dropped on him. What we get as a result of the Lightbringers’ quest is not restoration but a new synthesis. One could make a case that death, time, and entropy are good things — and try to add that Wakboth is a price worth paying for them — but I don’t think that is the Orlanthi line. I think — I could be wrong — that Orlanth and/or the Orlanthi think that the GC is justified because Storm’s place in the world is now recognised, and that any price is worth paying for that. Alternatively, the Lightbringers’ quest is not over until the conclusion of Argrath and the Devil: Argrath is the agent/tool of Orlanth Penitent (and the Invisible Moon — i.e. of the balance, of which Arachne Solara is the brains), and to save the world for good, OP must die and not rise again: then he will have shown he has learned better and accepted his part in the creation of the world (which is ongoing in the Third Age). It is a matter of whether he understands what the Sun Spider has done and approves, or whether he is just grudgingly going along with it without having much of a clue. Or maybe Orlanth is a bit like certain real-life politicians (some orange) and the Orlanthi love him because Storm is the id unleashed.

Maybe Orlanth still thinks he is living boy-meets-girl or the “little tailor”, but you’d think some part of him would twig that he is in plot three: (Apologies for the androcentrism; this is Heinlein in 1947.) Now there is more than one way to take Storm’s breaking the world and subsequently signing up to Arachne Solara’s compromise with death, evil, and entropy — a compromise in which a thinning world slowly slides back into the chaos from which it emerged. One could say that in the world of time, all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, and I have a deal of sympathy with that view. But I don’t think that is the take of Orlanth or the Orlanthi, who continue to rail against (at least two of) the forces they and their kin unleashed, twisted, and created (i.e. death, chaos, and the devil). So among the other aspects, wouldn’t we expect to see a cult of Orlanth Penitent, worshipping an Orlanth in sackcloth and ashes who is very very sorry? Is there such a cult (or something similar)? If not, is that because neither the Orlanthi nor the Big O his bad self did learn better, or is it because they have another spin on Oedipal regicide and resurrection which enables all concerned to keep their heads held proudly high? I bet some of you have imaginative, illuminating, and entertaining takes on this; hit us with them.

A very helpful post, but has Dragon Pass moved, was it once bigger, or is it now “just north” of Magasta’s Pool/the centre of Glorantha? I am confused — as usual!

I had a chat with Yelm about this, and this is what he told me (through his spittle-flecked beard): At this point, he had plasma shooting out of his ears, and he had to retreat to his padded cell withdraw to his imperial staterooms.

Time, entropy, the heat death of the universe — but we are both going to be dead long before the universe is, so let’s not sweat that. If it is just a fear of one’s own death writ large, should I conclude from the fact that I don’t want to die today that anything short of immortality is unacceptable? We should probably be grateful that we don’t share a worldview with HPL. [Bang! Bang! Bang! — That’s me nailing a jumbo-sized crate of worms firmly shut.] I sometimes think he is so successful (post mortem) because his fans don’t share his fears. (Cthulhu plushies!) We won’t play a game where we pretend to be scared of things we are actually scared of; we will play a game where we pretend to be scared of cute things like relativity and five-winged tentacled cucumbers. Much safer.

Presumably Nick’s guy with the pliers was supposed to be the anti-Glogauer. Moorcock quotes Jung, which bears on the ‘imitate your god’ theme here: Which is one answer to ‘should I contrive to lose to Zorak Zoran?’