mfbrandi

Argrath lit the flame and won victories, so who cares what Orlanth thinks? Orlanth needs to get with the program. Clearly, Argrath has weirdness up the yin–yang, but if Gloranthan dragons are Yang/Dragon (and I am really not sure), who in Glorantha are Yin/Tiger waiting for the right time to pounce?

So the Carmanians are Zoroastrians with a twist, right? Idovanus = Ahura Mazda/Ohrmazd, the “Wise Lord”. Ganesatarus = Angra Mainyu/Ahriman, the “Destructive Spirit”. I mean, we even have Magi. Now it is said that Idovanus is just another name for the Invisible God. But the Invisible God is the One — the Creator — and is preceded by the Zero, the Unknowable (GoG, Cults Book, p. 6). So the Invisible God creates everything, but the Invisible God does not create the Zero, because (a) the One is created from the Zero & (b) the Zero doesn’t need to be created because it is nothing. The Zero, the Unknowable is — of course — Chaos, and this sits well with the Zoroastrian parallel: Ahriman has always been around, breaks into the universe, and kills the archetypal man and the primeval bull. You have to have a bit of Chaos-on-bull action, right? But if Ganesatarus–Ahriman seems to embody Chaos, is s/he not also a good fit for Storm, the disorderly bringer of death and enemy of the lord of creation? I know Storm gods always bleat on about not being Chaotic, but they do seem to allow that their actions let Chaos into the universe. So are we back to Rebellus Terminus versus the Emperor, again? “But what has all this wittering to do with Invisible Orlanth?” I am glad you asked. We have two accounts of Invisible Orlanth: the Guide (p. 325) says “Invisible Orlanth, whose priests tell a tale of how their god was enlightened and conquered the Invisible God”, but Jeff says, “Orlanth the Great Rebel was enlightened by and then submitted to the Invisible God.” So who really won the fight? Isn’t this “Arkat fought Nysalor and Gbaji lost” all over again? If the Moon stands for balance, then the Lunar answer is that if either Arkat or Nysalor won, then Gbaji won — the only way for Gbaji to lose is if Light & Dark, Law & Chaos, Sun & Storm, Asha & Druj, Washington & Moscow, … Being & Nothingness are spinning in perfect balance. Surely, that is the teaching of the Invisible Orlanth cult: neither Ohrmazd nor Ahriman, but international socialism. So, Carmanian religion: the quote from the Guide above says that worshippers should balance light and dark actions, but then it seems to cite only “light” actions: maintain life and combat evil. That is not really giving the Devil his due, is it? But with Invisible Orlanth, they can get back to their religious roots and ensure that they are dominated neither by the Solar “Lunar” empire nor by that Stormy rabble from Charg — and as always, good luck deciding which of those threats to Carmania is really the chaotic one. As for Yolanela, the Taloned Countess, who couldn’t admire her? Clearly, she is Siân Phillips — who played Livia (in I, Claudius), Boudicca (in Warrior Queen), … and Princess Plethora (in The Leopard in Autumn).

Visible Orlanth — whose megalomaniacal/Pac-Man tendencies we have noted before — had been watching Highlander and Terminator films and doing some study of the Hebrew Bible and beat-up old skiffy paperbacks to get a handle on the evolution of monotheism. Then after taking a page out of Arkat’s book and a big bhong hit, he heroquested back to the beginning of everything and became the Invisible God. If in doubt, retcon the universe so that you are the reality underlying it. So Old Yahweh and Visible Orlanth — back when they were modest storm gods — may have had wives and fellow gods and even have taken advice every now and then, but New Improved Tetragrammaton (“washes whiter than white”) and Invisible Orlanth married? No, not a chance. Who would they marry, themselves? How do I know this? I found this very drunk, very blue guy in an alleyway, and this was the tale his sock puppets were telling each other. So it must be true … right?

Someone must have claimed that all air breathers are “children of Orlanth”.

Interesting: why not palatable? Atheist sorcerers are a goer, right? And they can spin any story they like to go with their “cult”. Or have I misunderstood you?

The mainstream Gloranthan opinion seems to be that illumination is a test many fail. (Pretty much everything in Glorantha seems to be a moral test widely failed.) But reclaiming moral authority? Moral Authority: trustworthiness to make decisions that are right and good Authority: the moral or legal right or ability to control So in taking away the threat of spirits of reprisal, illumination reduces the authority (ability to control) of the gods, but does it reduce their moral authority? Surely, Glorantha has many many gods with no moral authority. One doesn’t need a sudden blow to the back of the head — or a basketful of riddles answered — to see that. Or does my saying so mean that Nysalor has gotten to me, already? Wittgenstein spoke of two conceptions of religious ethics — it went something like this: Because it is right, God (being omniscient) tells us that it is right God tells us that it is right, and that is why it is right Although he was not religious himself, he said that the second was the deeper conception — after all, on the first, with enough wit and research we could find right conduct for ourselves, and God would drop out of the picture. Also, God would have to argue her case, show her working. As to whether the second amounts to any more than “I am God; do as you are told!”, well …

If the initial idea of the Nysalor cult and illumination was to have a pop at Buddhism (possibly in a debased western form of Zen; with Alan Watts as Gbaji?) — Arkat/arhat, illuminated/enlightened — then we seem to have an awful lot of “illuminates” who are doing a terrible job of hopping off the hamster wheel of saṃsāra. Perhaps that is part of the satire. In Ethilrist’s case, he doesn’t seem ready to let go of his massive ego and all his shiny stuff. He is clingy and afraid, and the next time will be just like the last, no? And as a sellsword, how is his karma? He needs to learn to stop worrying and love the void. If he lets Kajabor into his heart, he’ll be fine. Trust me, I’m a … well, OK, probably best not to trust me.

Trickster: “But they’ll kill me.” Patron: “If I withdraw my protection, your own village will kill you. You remember all the things you did, right?” Life as a bonded trickster is a looped “one last job and we’ll let you go” heist movie. In French, probably. One must imagine Sisyphus Eurmal happy.

Magic, perhaps, but not fireblade, tapping, and bat–gods flapping down Oxford Street chomping on innocent shoppers. To the extent that Glorantha makes elements of myth and religion concrete and literal and drops them as trip hazards around the landscape, it deviates from much real-world religion, no? The world as perceived by the IRL shaman is not that of Rachel Pollack’s Unquenchable Fire — they are not all batshit crazy. The Bishop of Durham’s god wouldn’t indulge in anything as crass as conjuring tricks with bones or torching unbelievers — though if we take Herr Jenkins at his word, YHWH could if they chose to — and Don Cupitt’s couldn’t (because not “real”). IMHO, it is a shame that Liz Williams’ Miracles of Our Own Making: a History of Paganism didn’t get into it about the “existence” of the gods of the new religious movements — whether they do, what it might mean — as she surely has the tools to say something interesting from an insider’s point of view.

And deely bobbers; must have deely bobbers — it is what JC would have wanted. (I swear I saw footage of him so dressed and accepting an honorary doctorate and/or talking to a large gathering of students, but I haven’t been able to turn up any images on Google.)

Fair enough, but I am not claiming that Stafford is pushing a narrative of inevitable decline, I am suggesting that maybe he is offering a subversive take on thinning, one in which the world reaching its thinnest is the eucatastrophe. If right — and at least nine times out of ten, I am wrong — that would make Stafford an anti-Tolkien not a wannabe Inkling.

I think I was pretty careful not to claim that. I just said that Stafford was riffing on Hesiod (and a zillion authors since), and that isn’t in dispute, is it? Nor that Gloranthans claim to see a pattern of destruction and remaking of their world. And I definitely don’t want to tell @John Biles why he picked that phrase. That would just be rude of me, no?

Never mind the tedious Mr. T. — the Society for the Appreciation of the Golden Age didn’t start with him. Surely, Stafford is riffing on Hesiod’s Works and Days, with the Hero Wars roughly corresponding to the Heroic Age (“the godly race of the heroes who are called demigods, our predecessors on the boundless earth”) sitting between the Bronze Age and Hesiod’s own (M. L. West’s translation) : Plausibly, we are to take Glorantha’s Fourth Age as corresponding to the time of Hesiod’s fifth men, with Hesiod our scribe in the time of Harshax. So someone in Glorantha at the end of its Bronze Age might be expected to look back and see a long period of decline — I don’t say that they are objectively right, but they might well see it that way — and look forward and see war getting into its stride. Tough times coming. Not mad, IMHO, to see thinning as a theme, but I like to think that Stafford’s KoS can be read as more than a SAGAish “no more pixie dust — innit awful!”, that it also allows a reading of “no more gods digging up my lawn — how restful.”

Speaking of which, in checking out the City on the Edge of Forever link, I saw that the Cults of Prax PDF is on sale for $2.59 for the next 4 hours and some minutes.

Very cool. I remember 1984: David Jenkins (the Bishop of Durham) and his comment on the resurrection as not “a conjuring trick with bones” and Cupitt’s Sea of Faith on TV. (Which kinda loops us back to old Ludwig, again.) I sometimes think Gloranthaphiles are over-impressed by conjuring tricks with bones — though in fairness to them, that may just be with their pretending-to-be-a-Gloranthan hats on. Still …

And yet we have the story: “What’s the Fourth Age like?”; Greg points out the window. I tend now to see the myth of how Glorantha thins through successive cycles of destruction as an aetiology of our world. I wouldn’t want everyone to agree with me — how dull that would be! — but maybe one day one person? Oh, and treating theistic magic like a science providing lots of shiny tech tools, didn’t someone try that? Remind me how that worked out for them.

Well, I wouldn’t put it past a Nysalorean riddler to seem to be indulging in overtone singing but actually to be singing whole-tone equal-tempered harmonies out of Debussy.

Interesting. I had the Dara Happan elite pegged as musical stick-in-the-muds. Choral music, yes, but with little to no harmony (octaves … and fifths at a push) — anything else would be impure and worse innovative. And obviously, they would hate the songs of the throat-singing horse nomads, even if they are fellow solars. Yes, with hyped-up hearing and a known drum culture, I was hoping for something special, too. I was imagining a trollish Swapan Chaudhuri making sarcastic comments about singers’ lack of rhythmic nous. And trollkin mastering the morsing (jaw harp) to avoid being eaten. This sort of vibe — Tala Âdi — something more subtle than the daylight people were expecting.

Thanks for that, John. I used to think of it that way, and certainly an illiteracy plague was about the worst thing I could imagine. And I am not about to become an Argrath admirer, but doubts did creep in. Certainly, in real life, obsessive and charismatic leaders are a nightmare. And the Iliad is a nice lesson in the mess heroes will make. And KoS plays it both ways, as there is also the strain of the Devil is coming back and who can you turn to this time? And perhaps it is hubristic to hope to break the cycle, but if the apocalypse is gliding toward us on its shiny metal rails, anyway … But how should we look at the killing of the gods? Yes, you could view it as a rejection of the sacred or a trashing of potential allies, but there are other ways to look at it, too. As a liberation from otherworld excuses for not looking for mundane solutions to political (and other) problems. As the trashing of a huge stockpile of WMD — as nuclear disarmament. And it is not a mundane world action — it is a symbolic or otherworld action — so rather than being another battlefield atrocity, no real people are harmed (just a bunch of cardboard cut-outs). But, you know, an illiteracy plague. Yuck!

Split the difference: … and make like Corey Harris.

He promised them Grateful Dead tickets, of course.

So we know something of the uses to which music is put in Glorantha: dance; trance (shamanism); seduction; magical traps (e.g. music heard by the deaf); religious conversion; showing off/status seeking; partying. But that is primarily music as a means to an end, not as an end in itself. And we know something of the musical instruments of Glorantha: harp/lyre (Harana Ilor, Jar-Eel, etc.); chime bells (Ernalda); bagpipes (Orlanth); flute (Erabbamanth); goblet(?) drum (Hombobobom). We can guess some of the instruments Glorantha does not have: valve trumpet; saxophone; piano. But given how much we “know” about population counts, religion, and mass bloodshed, the musical arts do seem rather neglected by Glorantha’s creators. What do we know of Gloranthan instrumental music as an independent art — about music for its own sake? Are there rival tuning conventions? Is it ever melodically, harmonically, or rhythmically sophisticated? Does it have its Charles Parker, Pauline Oliveros, or Swapan Chaudhuri? What do the musical arts sound like in your Glorantha? Are the Uz masters of layakari? Do the Dragonewts have their own take on serialism? Are the Mostali stockpiling Morton Subotnick CDs? We need to know — tell us!

Similarity is not always a basis for getting along, especially if you are competing for the same niche — husband of the earth, maybe. Think of fans of rival local soccer teams or neighbouring biker gangs. The English and the French. North and South London. The narcissism of small differences? And it must be embarrassing for the Orlanthi to see how they rely on Lodril’s “family.” If Ernalda is a daughter/not-a-daughter of Asrelia, then perhaps Gustbran is a son/not-a-son of Lodril. Volcano god = smith god — that looks like something we’ve seen before, doesn’t it? But they are hardly going to do without fire, warmth, and bronze, are they? Although I am reminded of a tale a college friend told of mad hippies in Australia’s Northern Territory and their splinter groups’ increasing austerities culminating in “freshairtarians” who outdid the vegans by spurning all food — there’s your self-limiting Orlanthi Radical Airy Faction, right there. It is what Glorantha needs: more religious extremism.

Or all three things. Or it depends how you look at it. Or … Even within the WF9 article (p. 4), we have: “An aetiological myth from the western lands tells that Genert fathered many goddesses upon his sister Gata, and that they are the local earth goddesses found everywhere.” Sisters (dark/light) and the three generations (daughter/mother/crone) “in myth and religion” may be treated as one entity … or different entities. “Finally, all of the births of the different goddesses by each other are parthenogenetic, or virgin births.” If I’d looked harder, I would possibly have found more perspectives. The in-game takeaway is likely that which story gets told depends on who is telling it, the purpose for which they are telling it, and on the context in which they are telling it — cult secrets; different (incompatible) tales for different public rites of the same cult; different aetiological myths depending on what you are trying to explain; und so weiter … — so just jam on the themes as required. Up here in the metaland of playerville, we don’t have to think there is one or any “really true truth”. Just root for what will wind up your rivals and enemies … just like your characters in-game.

People say he is lazy — and we all like to laze about from time to time — but mostly it is his detractors who say this. I mean, he made the Gods Wall, and that seems like a bit of an undertaking. Fire types are not big on praising change/innovation (because Air associated?), but when we read things like “made the first cylinder seal” (GRoY — somewhere), I think we are probably not going too far if we say invented the cylinder seal. So a deity of farming, but also of invention, innovation, civil engineering (irrigation), and generally getting the job done. If getting the job done with minimum effort, all the better. I hadn’t given Lodril much thought before this thread, but he does seem to be a maligned character.