mfbrandi

So I take it you have no truck with what sometimes seems like orthodoxy: in Glorantha, two contradictory things can both be true.

Reading to Wittering is 133 kilometers (83 miles), apparently. To me that is a fair bit of shoe leather, but we are a very small country — with very small minds, but sadly no longer with very small cars. Redding is where the lifts/elevators come from, right?

It is weird, isn’t it, that we’re supposed to accept that the Gloranthans have their cosmology/astronomy figured out correctly? But maybe we are not quite meant to accept that: In GRoY (p. 71) we have: This suggests that Gloranthan science isn’t done, yet. If the story of Glorantha is one of thinning — and thinning I think should be viewed as a Good Thing — perhaps Fourth Age Glorantha will have its Copernicus, Brahe, and Kepler. Of course, if the Aldryami (see proxy below) view it as thinning ( --> ), perhaps the Mostali see it as the repair of the world machine ( <-- ) I like to think of it as the slow comedown from a mammoth trip with the world as it always was slowly reasserting itself in its inhabitants’ minds.

Godlearner report just in: TL;DR: Tides in the air driven by the sun and the moon. In Dara Happa, some people are feeling very smug.

I suppose this bit of doggerel must have come up before: The Wind and the Moon by George MacDonald Said the Wind to the Moon, “I will blow you out; You stare In the air Like a ghost in a chair, Always looking what I am about — I hate to be watched; I'll blow you out.” The Wind blew hard, and out went the Moon. So, deep On a heap Of clouds to sleep, Down lay the Wind, and slumbered soon, Muttering low, “I've done for that Moon.” He turned in his bed; she was there again! On high In the sky, With her one ghost eye, The Moon shone white and alive and plain. Said the Wind, “I will blow you out again.” The Wind blew hard, and the Moon grew dim. “With my sledge, And my wedge, I have knocked off her edge! If only I blow right fierce and grim, The creature will soon be dimmer than dim.” He blew and he blew, and she thinned to a thread. “One puff More's enough To blow her to snuff! One good puff more where the last was bred, And glimmer, glimmer, glum will go the thread.” He blew a great blast, and the thread was gone. In the air Nowhere Was a moonbeam bare; Far off and harmless the shy stars shone — Sure and certain the Moon was gone! The Wind he took to his revels once more; On down, In town, Like a merry—mad clown, He leaped and halloed with whistle and roar — “What's that?” The glimmering thread once more! He flew in a rage — he danced and blew; But in vain Was the pain Of his bursting brain; For still the broader the Moon—scrap grew, The broader he swelled his big cheeks and blew. Slowly she grew — till she filled the night, And shone On her throne In the sky alone, A matchless, wonderful silvery light, Radiant and lovely, the queen of the night. Said the Wind: “What a marvel of power am I! With my breath, Good faith! I blew her to death — First blew her away right out of the sky — Then blew her in; what strength have I!” But the Moon she knew nothing about the affair; For high In the sky, With her one white eye, Motionless, miles above the air, She had never heard the great Wind blare.

But voices keep telling us — nurse, my pills! — that it is futile to distinguish between parent and child in Stormland: Vinga is Orlanth, and Vinga is Orlanth’s child, too. So maybe Orlanth is Umath, and Orlanth is Umath’s child, too. And Sky is both one and many and parent to Storm. So Orlanth killed his father, and he did bring “the right guy” back (on a cyclical, strictly entropic basis, of course).

And this fits in fine with Sedenya the Changer being one of the rebel gods who plots against Yelm (GRoY, p. 14). And sister/schmister — don’t let apparent differences of sex fool you into multiplying entities. Look at how the Thunder family keeps threatening to collapse back into Orlanth only. Smoke, mirrors, and the odd woad-dyed sock.

Well, I am always happy to contradict Tolstoy, so I’ll say “no”. Will Stan Lee send me a no-prize?

I agree that She-Hulk != Hulk, and that they are not sock puppets or masks of some unknowable Über-Hulk. I was merely navigating within the canon that Vinga is Orlanth — in some sense, and possibly in a quite straightforward sense. I am neither supporting nor attacking that bit of canon, but it is canon, right? The identity theory doesn’t need explanation, right? In the octopus–sock puppet theory, Shari Lewis is the unknowable Orlanth/octopus, Lamb Chop is Vinga, and Charlie Horse is Orlanth Rex.

Here are two ways to look at the thing: The octopus–sock puppet theory: The true Orlanth is unknowable by mortals, but on the end of each of their tentacles is a puppet; these puppets are Orlanth x, Orlanth y, …, Hedkoranth, Vanganth, and our old friend, Vinga; the Gloranthan mortals interact with the sock puppets — lucky them! The identity theory: You too can touch the face of god, who is fully present in every manifestation, and just as Hesperus/the evening star = Phosphorus/the morning star = the planet Venus, so Orlanth = Vinga, no ifs, no buts, no shell game, no find the lady, and no Shari Lewis. (I was going to call these the Transcendent Orlanth (1) and Immanent Orlanth (2) theories, but on reflection: poncy and unnecessary.) Bearing in mind that these are “theories” about a deity/deities, not about cults/subcults, according to the octopus–sock puppet take on things, Hedkoranth != Orlanth Adventurous != Vinga. Crucially, none of them is Orlanth, tout court, who remains unknowable. It seems to me that this could be handled so as to offend no one. However, if one picked one of the male or masculine sock puppets as the real Orlanth, but held all the others — including Vinga — still to be sock puppets, or hats, or disguises, my guess is that some people wouldn’t like that. In let’s-not-try-to-rewrite-canon mode, I like the identity theory. Worshipers don’t have to know all the identities (and can argue about them) — just as not everyone knew the morning star was the evening star — but no one’s god gets to be second-rate. It doesn’t matter whether you see Venus in the morning or the evening, you are seeing the same planet, the whole planet. There is no need on either theory to hold that the deity is essentially male or essentially masculine. How hard a group of Orlanthi lean into this will depend on their knowledge of the “mysteries” of their god/dess … as well as their mundane needs and insecurities. In play, you don’t have to embrace all or any of the canonical identities, and you certainly don’t have to heed anything I say. YGWV.

And presumably there is nothing mysterious or sense-stretching about this: when we are talking gods (rather than cults), Orlanth Thunderous = Orlanth Adventurous = Orlanth Rex = Orlanth tout court. Not many gods, but one god. Identity, pure and simple. Right? So the various cults or subcults may celebrate different aspects or achievements of the god, but their POW in worship all goes to the same entity. The worshipers don’t have to grasp this — though many will, one imagines — but we “IRL people” know what is going on, and we don’t need proofs or demonstrations: Chaosium can just stipulate identities, and that is fine. Now, gods are slippery characters, and doubtless they can change sex, gender, and appearance, and be in two places at once, so in Glorantha/from the characters’ point of view, “that can’t be Orlanth on the green, Orlanth is passed out in the pub” won’t get you anywhere. Characters need to engage in religion — dissection of scripture, religious experience, “magical proof”, whatever — to settle such matters. Clearly, if we as players did that, we would be crackers. It seems clear that Orlanth = Vinga is canon. (And I am not here to dispute canon: YGMV, so what would be the point?) This doesn’t have to be dressed up any more than Thunderous = Rex — it is a simple statement of identity, not an “ooh, how can that be?” moment for the players. If that is the case, I have to agree with @Eff that this should be handled sensitively, and if possible playfully — with non-masculine/non-male attributes and pronouns adhering to Orlanth outside of the cult of Vinga, and Vinga not seeming like a drag act (as I know I will get dumped on from a great height if I suggest that the Orlanthi are a bunch of barbarian conservatives who know no better). I am not going to make any claims about current representation of Vinga — I am not qualified — but certainly, this hasn’t always been the case: Hero Wars’ “girls can play, but they have to dye their hair and wear a skirt” (i.e. women dragged up as women, no?) was perhaps no one’s finest moment, especially as it seemed that Adventurous was open to women, anyway. (There was a statement that some Orlanth subcults were men-only, but either I didn’t look hard enough or none of those specified were. Maybe Rex if there was an assumption that no woman would get to be clan leader or king.) IMHO — and it is just my opinion, not holy writ, and not a call to arms — if Orlanth were to be deemed “all man” and Vinga just a dress he puts on to con “the ladies” into worshiping him, that would be kinda tasteless. Presumably, that is not @Jeff’s intention. If Orlanth is officially sex-changing and gender-fluid, what does everyone think of their representation? I am supposed to be shutting up, after all!

Sure, absolutely, and this is not an attempt to remake canon. Just having a bit of fun with: monomythic reductive tendencies; people who think that identity is a directional relationship. I would never try to subordinate Sedenya to Orlanth. Orlanth, Schmorlanth: I wouldn’t know him from Adam! (This is a callback to Saul Kripke.)

Well, anyone can pick it up and blurt with it, but I think people deserve a rest from my wittering.

I think we can mark this one officially kicked to death and abandoned in a rat-infested alley. This morning, I stumbled across Ron “Sorcerer” Edwards’ Why Glorantha, and brutally condensed and distorted, it’ll make a fine full stop:

I like this: whoever I am, I am certainly not me. It had to be a counting song:

But the distinction between day and night, life and death is an illusion, for if Yelm is the day, the source of all life (“allfather” — a title once claimed by a certain storm king too), he is also: And if Yelm = Death (“Notbeing …an absence, not a presence” (GRoY, p. 14)) — so the void, the end of all things — then not only is he the cause of his own disintegration — not another utuma! — but also (as Wakboth/Kajabor — also famously cyclic) the father of the moon and time and so the agent of his own rebirth into cyclic magnificence. (And if Arachne Solara has always seemed to have something of the dark about her, clearly she is also the sun spider.) Note also on Moon–Storm equivalence: Sedenya is famously not Entekos (if I understand correctly), but maybe she is Wrong Air. Is it worth trying to slide a cigarette paper between Umath the first rebel, Sedenya the Changer, and Lanatum the Thunderer? Clearly, we have been given toys we can play with in different ways: So with my mystic’s hat on, I say, “There is one myth — suicide, rinse and repeat — open your third eye and touch the divine — the one is many, all is one.” If I had a polytheist’s hat, I’d say, “These apparent identities are traps set by the Deceiver. Burn the heretic!” Godlearners: “Hat schmat! Identity schmidentity! Let’s freak out the rubes and blow something up.”

I thought “a big piece of his posterity” was a euphemism and that he’d gotten started on the utuma early, storing the severed bits in his pouch. (In my head: Julian and Sandy from Round the Horne.)

Done: Storm and Moon (featuring Vinga)

[Spun off from Vinga in Pavis ’cos this is nothing to do with Pavis] @mfbrandi said (because, you know, broken record: our worst fights are with ourselves): @Nick Brooke said (in Godtime — it is an eternal recurrence): And this is all part of my sneaky — well, OK, moronic and obvious — plan to bring the discussion back to subversive non-canon theories about Vinga. We know that there are Seven Lightbringers and Seven Mothers because the latter are supposed to echo the former. We know that Moon is the power of balance through cycles, but Orlanth’s great achievement (I am sure he’d claim the credit) was to kill the Sun and have it come back half the time — balancing Light and Darkness in a cycle. But the Sun is Light is Life, and Darkness is the Hungry Void and so is Chaos. So the balance Orlanth/Storm achieved looks a lot like the balance Sedenya achieved between Life/Fertility and Anti-Life/Chaos. And what are free will and change — surely dear to Storm — without time? The murder wasn’t a mistake, it was a necessity. As for the Moon and free will: Natha was “one of the earliest deities who acted on her own volition in the Gods Age” (Hero Wars, p. 82). Rufelza, we read, “is the Red Moon: red blood, red earth, and red rage. She was created when Wakboth the Destroyer impregnated the great goddess Glorantha.” (Hero Wars, p. 85). The cosmology in Cults of Terror speculates that although Arachne Solara’s “origins are mysterious and subject to speculation … there are strong indications that she is the ghost of Glorantha, the Mother of the Universe.” So the origin of Time in the ritual of the net echoes the birth of the Red Moon. Now Vinga is the Red Woman “the last defense for women. When a woman screams for help and it arrives, that is Vinga’s power. A woman who has taken the Red Vows is called a Red Woman. Ernalda subcult” Hmm … red earth, red rage, red woman — that reminds me of someone. So if anyone is upset that Vinga = Orlanth means that Vinga is “really a man”, they shouldn’t worry because Orlanth = the Red Goddess, so you could just as well say Orlanth is “really a woman”. And if when you squint and in a poor light, Sedenya = Inanna, well Inanna could make a man a woman and a woman a man. Humans’ failure to see that all is one, and all is change, and all is held balanced and spinning causes laughter in the middle air. At least, that’s what one whispers to cultists in crisis, and then one scarpers before the lynch mob arrives.

Hmm … I thought Storm hated Moon because they both claimed “the middle air” — that it was just another turf war, and that the “oh, no: chaos!” thing was just propaganda — but I invariably get these things wrong. In their way, the Storm lot are as much about balancing opposites as the Lunars: “no one can make you do anything” vs. “behave like everyone else”. And can illuminates discern any real difference between themselves and others? “We are all us” … even them.

Trouble is that crusaders may end up being a bigger local problem than a mere gang of rowdy alcoholics.

But as in the discussion of Vinga, there is surely always room for another take on those gods’ worship alongside the traditional one.

Sure, absolutely.

Just for the record, I am not saying that because there seem to be societies with gender rôles in Glorantha, we should all play sexist arseholes in Glorantha (not your wording, I know) and revel in it. No — yuck! I am saying that just as there is colonialism in Glorantha and some people like throwing off its yoke in play, some people might like to play to throw off the yoke of the patriarchy in the PCs’ own society. That is OK, isn’t it? To allow something into the fiction is not necessarily to endorse that thing. And to be able to overcome in the fiction what one cannot overcome IRL may be fun and even therapeutic, no?

[Emphasis above mine.] I did a double-take. I mean the Orlanthi do seem pretty hung-up. So I am in two minds about this. If the alternatives are [a] women will get back in the kitchen and like it, or [b] we wave a magic wand and despite all the Sky Fathers, Earth Mothers, and adolescent Stormboys acting out, down on the ground sexism was never there — if those are all we have to pick between — then I choose Team Brooke. But what about the anarcho-vegetarian, cat-loving sisterhood kicking against the patriarchal pricks of Waha’s miserable band of butchers? How about the women from Suzy McKee Charnas’s Holdfast books turning up on horseback in Prax and causing some trouble? You are “stealing” my enemies by de-fanging the traditionalists. IRL the links between myth, religion, and the facts on the ground are complex and maybe pretty loose, but aren’t we asked in Glorantha to buy into a much tighter as above, so below (albeit with a mechanism for tinkering with the above from below)? And, yeah, the creators — I have no inside scoop, I am just guessing — were probably way too into what we might think of as the problematic aspects of their creation, but rather than subjecting it to an audit from the Ministry of Truth — Waha for men only: down the memory hole — I kinda want to blow it up and watch the pieces rain down on the plains, annoying the already fractious rhinos. Of course, there could be mischief to be had in explaining to the youth of Prax, Sartar, or wherever that despite what the gods did and what the priests say, we don’t do it like that, we never have done, and we never will. I just don’t know.