mfbrandi

If we are getting Freudian — and I claim no special knowledge of Freud — aren’t the gods like the id? A cursory skim of Wikipedia turned up this striking quote (presumably edited by the Wikipedia contributor) from Siggy (New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1933), p. 106 — apparently): That’s Godtime and the Gods’ War, right there, no? Isn’t the nearest thing to an internalised parent figure — and perhaps it is a case of close, but no cigar — the superego?

Death in the street? Are you perhaps thinking of someone else? It is maybe worth quoting at length from Ray Monk’s account of the last days of dear old Ludwig (pp. 579-580 of my edition) as it touches on the topics of this thread:

And we are back to “Jesus Take the Wheel” — he won’t, not unless you take it yourself. Sincere religion needn’t mean an embrace of hocus-pocus and suspensions of normal causality.

How are we supposed to understand Gloranthan divine magic?

Or we are the gods, and we are just coming to understand ourselves better? If Arkat = Gbaji = Nysalor and Arkat = humanity and Nysalor = supernatural presence in the world ???????? The “enemy” is always oneself, never an external figure, not really. (“We are all god and we are all on the hero’s journey” never sits well with me, though — that is because I am a dirty stinking Limey unbeliever.)

Or the devil’s possible return is the possibility of humanity’s shirking its responsibility for itself and the world it has “inherited”? And we each individually bear the full burden of that. The devil should never be externalised.

But if we see the trajectory not as a falling away from the worship of the gods but as a moving towards a Gloranthan religion resembling IRL religions, where the gods are invisible/intangible/inaccessible and worshipers have to shift for themselves — which, if you like, is the divine plan, anyway — this is perfect, isn’t it? Bye-bye J G Frazer theme park, hello grown-up religion.

Or maybe the god’s will is done — as it always is — for that is what the unfolding of history is, whatever it contains.

Divine agency as threatening, certainly. And in as much as the hero is close to divinity, the hero’s too, I guess. As I tend to see “devil” and hero as the same entity, I see the Devil-full-of-gods dissected on the net as Argrath as much as it is Wakboth, the tortured child is the hero. Thus Argrath’s apotheosis — utuma — is his death to save/renew the world. That is a familiar enough pattern. And if Argrath is not only the dying “son” but also the cosmic dragon who creates the world, we can see the swallowing of the gods as a move toward monotheism of a hands-off “invisible” god variety. Perhaps, there is a reason Arkat comes out of the west. So I don’t see this trajectory as Christopher Hitchens’ last laugh, but as a reminder that humanity must grow up and take responsibility for itself. Doubtless there are a thousand things that militate against such a reading.

I like elemental runes as corresponding to phases of matter (rather than chemical elements or compounds). I don’t think anybody else does. The elemental runes as “atoms” approach would presumably have air as available in at least two phases (solid and gas — mocking elemental associations?), rather than having water runes transmute to air runes at boiling point — but its champions must give us the real lowdown.

Thanks for chipping in, Richard. I don’t want to put words into your mouth, but would it be fair to say that the two of us might look at an event, agree on some boring “scientific” explanation of it, but that you might also be able to say that it is God’s will?

No, it is fine: if you want to say something else, go ahead. All contributions are welcome.

This is all good, and thanks for reminding me of the name “Jogrampur” (the idea I couldn’t forget), but if you feel like it, turn your brain toward IRL conceptions of magic and religion and then play that off against Gloranthan shit if you like. I am in the camp of real-life magic and religion are not about blowing stuff up and pulling the lever on the celestial chocolate dispenser, so we don’t get to point at all the practitioners and say, “You idiots, you didn’t get nothin’!” I seem to be in a minority of one, because everybody else thinks that either [a] it is about a faulty understanding of cause and effect or [b] it is not so crazy to think that there is cause and effect there. I would, of course, be overjoyed to be wrong about what other people think (which I usually am, anyway). What is your take? I mean you did say: … but that is perilously close to “if you pray, something will happen or it won’t.” But perhaps that is not what you meant.

It is OK. I mean what you said is true, but the other translation is snappier and preserves the verblessness and beachiness of the thing. Just think Pauline à la plage. 😉 I think my view of the Frenchness of Canada is skewed due to my half-French cousin marrying a French Canadian. I mean the two of them must make up 90% of the population, right? As for drifting off topic, I think we have all done it on this thread. It is kinda my thread, and I don’t mind — say whatever you like.

Do these not affect the infant death rate, too? I’d think these would be even harder on children, but that may be wrong.

If you don’t think these will fix the problem (or if that belief is only incidental: you have a theory about your practice, but the practice doesn’t rest on it) but they have a rightness for you/produce satisfaction, then old LW might have admitted these as magic (or magic-adjacent language games), but of course, he was both an academic and a jackass.

Wittgenstein is not saying that the ritual lacks power, and he is not saying that it is not a perfectly satisfactory way to effect an adoption. He is saying — whether we want to follow him or not — that the ritual, the piece of magic, stands on its own two feet and does not require shoring up by theory: it is fine on its own. He does say that the adoptive mother does not believe that she has given birth to her adoptive child. He does not say this to mock or undermine the ritual; he says this against Frazer. Of course, one can always say “it is not literally true, but …”, but old Ludwig would say that there is no need. I would add that there is no need for theories of figurative or metaphorical meaning: a metaphor is (typically) false, but it is suggestive of something else; do we need to say any more? Wittgenstein claims — and it is up to us whether we want to follow him in this — that the enemy’s photo is not stabbed in order to cause the enemy harm, that it is similar to kissing the picture of a loved one, which is not supposed to benefit the loved one but feels right and satisfying to the kisser. For Wittgenstein, magic is expressive. For Frazer (or LW’s Frazer, at least), it is ropy technology founded on a false theory. Ludwig isn’t decrying the photo-stabbing magic, but equally it was not, one supposes, part of his life.

The English translation I know and love is “Beneath the streets, the beach!” which to my ear seems appropriately playful, but I shouldn’t bandy translations from the French with a Canadian! As I understand it, the reason the “beach” was being revealed is that the stones were being prised up to throw at the coppers. My baby brother was born in May ’68, but I think the poetry of it was lost on him — though I did get him this as a birthday present one year:

Well, I probably didn’t do a good job of asking the question. My fault. Think of the cases of kissing a photo and stabbing an image of one’s enemy. Isn’t praying to one’s god like those? The photo kisser isn’t going to say, “I kissed their photo, but my beloved couldn’t feel the kiss.” The image stabber isn’t going to say, “I stabbed the picture over and over, but somehow my enemy is still alive; what went wrong?” (unless that’s part of the ritual, of course). To quote Jim Morrison: “When I was back there at seminary school, there was a person who put forward the proposition that you can petition the lord with prayer. You cannot petition the lord with prayer.” This isn’t because the god in question “doesn’t exist” or is powerless, it is because religion is not a theory about how the world works, and prayer isn’t a lever you can pull to get a chocolate bar. Of course, you can have bad theories about how religion works and what gods are, and then you might expect … anything, but I don’t want to write off all religious people as nut jobs (or worse, philosophers). Yes, a myth may say that a type of god lives 100 years or 10, or indefinitely, but in telling the myth, are you making a claim about the properties of the furniture of the world?

As promised, some quotes from Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough (Brynmill Press edition). Page 1e: Page 2e: Page 3e–4e:

Over in the Argrath Good/Bad Orlanthi thread: … and I think that probably deserves its own thread. For context, here’s my take on the “founding myth” of Glorantha, the one we all read at the beginning of RQ2 — with some of the later elaborations: So the question is — I think — if this is a tale told by a religious person, not by a Richard Dawkins or a Christopher Hitchens, what is going on? (To try and keep the question open and not have me shut it down before we’ve started.) I don’t really think this is problematic — even given my spin on the myth — it is a tale of the desirability of human self-reliance. It expresses an attitude toward life (the universe and everything). And probably, we could just leave it there, but the trouble is that people have theories about what religious belief is, what it means, and what religious believers “really think” the world is like. I am as guilty of this as anyone … probably more so. Cards on the table: I am not religious; I never have been; when people try to explain their faith to me, I do not understand them. Does that make me an atheist? Well, as Eff says, what is a god anyway? (Although asking the question is maybe a sign something has already gone wrong.) An attitude that Wittgenstein attributes to J G Frazer (of Golden Bough fame) is that the religion and magic of “primitive” people embodies mistakes about the world. This is echoed in Campbell’s notion of the cosmological function of myth as proto-science. That is: people used to have theories about how the world worked — and these invoked gods and spirits — but we have science, which is better and replaces their “magical” theories like-for-like. I tend to agree with Wittgenstein that this attitude short-changes the people Frazer was talking about: it makes them out to be idiots, which clearly they were not. Wittgenstein would probably say that attempting to explain religious practice is a mistake. Me? I honestly don’t know. (I will put some quotes from Wittgenstein on The Golden Bough in a later comment.) So in my clumsy way, I was trying to suggest that there is nothing strange about a religious person creating myths about gods who are nothing but trouble, and that it is a mistake to think that all religious people are deluded — they don’t think that gods are part of the furniture of the world in the way that Toni Morrison was, whatever myths they may tell. At least not all of them do (and that is where I really slipped up), and it seems charitable to assume they don’t. Myths are not fighting for space with physics, and this is where Glorantha gets odd: it seems we are being asked to treat Glorantha as a place where myth and magic take the place of the physical sciences. When one inserts religion into Glorantha, things get mind-bending: myth has to do double duty as science and as myth (i.e. what if Frazer were right, but the world was different?) — but don’t we have different requirements of these two things? Anyway, that’s more than enough rubbish from me. What does everybody else think?

Thanks for your reply. I think that if I reply in any depth here, it will hi-jack the thread, so I will start a fresh one and then retro-fit a link here.

Does a shaman have to believe in one or more interventionist gods? Do they have to think that interventionist gods are a good thing? Does all sincere religion have ontological commitments? On the first two, I couldn’t say. On the last, I suspect that not all practitioners think so: pantheists; some Buddhists; some Quakers. But maybe I have that wrong, too.

For a sex and blood and rock and roll take on Earth rites (that made me feel quite ill, but Your Nausea May Vary), see the novel The Shattered Horse by S P Somtow (Somtow Sucharitkul for those with long memories). The “horse” in question is the Trojan one.

If you mean, we should assume minimal deviation from real-world physics and chemistry to avoid headaches and nosebleeds (and so players can figure out what their characters could reasonably attempt), then I have every sympathy. For other people, that is not their MGF.