mfbrandi

14 hours ago, Eff said:

Almost a fusion of an Oedipus and Electra complex together at that point, understanding gods as "parental" figures who humanity must move beyond to reach childhood's end. 

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):

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contrary impulses exist side by side, without cancelling each other … There is nothing in the id that could be compared with negation … nothing in the id which corresponds to the idea of time

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?

11 minutes ago, Darius West said:

a period of prolonged self neglect of which his death in the street was part

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:

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The last remark of On Certainty was written on 27 April [1951], the day before Wittgenstein finally lost consciousness. The day before that was his sixty-second birthday. He knew it would be his last. When Mrs Bevan presented him with an electric blanket, saying as she gave it to him: ‘Many happy returns’, he stared hard at her and replied: ‘There will be no returns.’ He was taken violently ill the next night, after he and Mrs Bevan had returned from their nightly stroll to the pub. When told by Dr Bevan that he would live only a few more days, he exclaimed ‘Good!’ Mrs Bevan stayed with him the night of the 28th, and told him that his close friends in England would be coming the next day. Before losing consciousness he said to her: ‘Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.’
  The next day Ben, Anscombe, Smythies and Drury were gathered at the Bevans’ home to be with Wittgenstein at his death. Smythies had brought with him Father Conrad, but no one would decide whether Conrad should say the usual office for the dying and give conditional absolution, until Drury recollected Wittgenstein’s remark that he hoped his Catholic friends prayed for him. This decided the matter, and they all went up to Wittgenstein’s room and kneeled down while Conrad recited the proper prayers. Shortly after this, Dr Bevan pronounced him dead.
  The next morning he was given a Catholic burial at St Giles’s Church, Cambridge. The decision to do this was again prompted by a recollection of Drury’s … although Drury admits: ‘I have been troubled ever since as to whether what we did was right.’ …
  Wittgenstein was not a Catholic. He said on a number of occasions, both in conversation and in his writings, that he could not bring himself to believe the things that Catholics believe. Nor, more important, did he practise Catholicism. And yet there seems to be something appropriate in his funeral being attended by a religious ceremony. For, in a way that is centrally important but difficult to define, he had lived a devoutly religious life.
  A few days before his death Wittgenstein was visited in Cambridge by Drury, and remarked to him: “Isn’t it curious that, although I know I have not long to live, I never find myself thinking about a “future state”. All my interest is still on this life and the writing I am still able to do.’ But if Wittgenstein did not think of a future life, he did think of how he might be judged. Shortly before his death he wrote: ‘God may say to me: “I am judging you out of your own mouth. Your own actions have made you shudder with disgust when you have seen other people do them.”’
  The reconciliation with God that Wittgenstein sought was not that of being accepted back into the arms of the Catholic Church; it was a state of ethical seriousness and integrity that would survive the scrutiny of even that most stern of judges, his own conscience: ‘the god who in my bosom dwells’.

5 minutes ago, Eff said:

And that's not true of "IRL religions" generally.

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.

3 minutes ago, Eff said:

Do Gloranthans in the present of the setting not have to "shift for themselves"?

How are we supposed to understand Gloranthan divine magic?

24 minutes ago, Eff said:

understanding gods as "parental" figures who humanity must move beyond to reach childhood's end. 

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.)

15 minutes ago, Eff said:

I suppose it could be interpreted as the everpresent threat of Mommy Sedenya coming to revert humanity to dependent childhood

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.

2 minutes ago, Eff said:

"But it's still here, and now it's invisible instead!"

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.

2 minutes ago, Joerg said:

Dealing with capricious deities without the desired results might mean that you should find a better way to make deals

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

1 hour ago, Eff said:

the assertion of agency is seen as cosmologically threatening, something which could destroy the world. Existence in this interpretation seems to be  … I'll say that Glorantha's existence in this interpretation seems to be a gigantic Omelas machine

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.

39 minutes ago, Baron Wulfraed said:

if one boils water it turns to steam... Is steam considered a gas (air)?

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.

17 minutes ago, Richard S. said:

The proof of the magic depends on the observer, and rational science can coexist with irrational mythology

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?

11 minutes ago, Richard S. said:

Thanks for clarifying what the point of the topic is right as I was typing, though now I need to erase everything I'd written since it wasn't relevant.

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

1 hour ago, Joerg said:

Immortality of gods … The Jogrampur experiment succeeded beyond their wildest imagination … One such pair of cumulative magical activities are the Cloud Call and Cloud Clear rune spells.

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:

1 hour ago, Joerg said:

The real world polytheist model of interaction with the divine is that sufficient appeal to an entity will result in its action or inaction.

… but that is perilously close to “if you pray, something will happen or it won’t.” But perhaps that is not what you meant.

12 minutes ago, Bill the barbarian said:

Bandy away, French is my second language and one I have not—and at my age, I fear I never will—master. And as a note, too many Canadians do not speak french … but seeing as we are stealing this great thread for small gain I suggest we retreat with the waves and leave this beach to the sand.

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.

3 hours ago, Jeff said:

But it also has a high adult death rate due to war, famine, spirits, monsters, etc.

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

8 hours ago, Eff said:

even though it's only academics and jackasses like me who'd call thumping a computer or swearing at a car a magical practice.

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.

9 hours ago, Eff said:

So when an adoption requires a ritual reenactment of birth, that is a birth in the very important sense that it means that your adoptive mother has given birth to you and established the maternal relationship through the figurative birth … That could be a very long discussion about the power of ritual to create meaning and all that jazz, but my point here is that Wittgenstein's approach is to assume that the religious practice, because it cannot be true literally, could not be "believed in", could not be really understood as truth. And yet we understand in other contexts that rituals do not have to be literal to have power.

But that's for what is, facially, a secular rite in either case. How does this relate to, to use one of Wittgenstein's other examples, stabbing an image of someone to do them harm?

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.

8 hours ago, Bill the barbarian said:

This is s very interesting caption for an expression which translates as "under the paving stones you'll find sand" and could mean "under civilization lies freedom!" I like both the original sense and the sense you have used scott. In 4 short sentences and a revolutionary bit of graffiti... you have me thinking as much as the other two had.

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:

3 hours ago, Eff said:

But setting that aside, the question of "interventionist" in relation to gods (whatever they are) is perhaps a bit confusing to me. What's a non-interventionist god? Would interventionism mean a god that responds to human appeal in a way that explicitly contradicts the laws of physics, or that does so on their own? That is, there seems to be a kind of assumption that gods and spirits are cleanly separable from natural processes, such that you can distinguish natural lighting from the unnatural lightning of an interventionist weather god. To a very real extent, this begins by defining gods as clearly parasitic or perhaps commensal organisms, ones which are uninvolved with the actual processes but just sit there and perhaps redirect some lightning bolts every once in a while.

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:

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   Frazer’s account of the magical and religious notions of men is unsatisfactory: it makes these notions appear as mistakes.
   Was Augustine mistaken, then, when he called on God on every page of the Confessions?
   Well — one might say — if he was not mistaken, then the Buddhist holyman, or some other, whose religion expresses quite different notions, surely was. But none of them was making a mistake except where he was putting forward a theory.

   Even the idea of trying to explain the practice — say the killing of the priest-king — seems to me wrong-headed. All that Frazer does is to make this practice plausible to people who think as he does. It is very queer that all these practices are finally presented, so to speak, as stupid actions.
   But it never becomes plausible that people do all this out of sheer stupidity.

Page 2e:

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   Frazer says it is very difficult to discover the error in magic and this is why it persists for so long — because, for example, a ceremony which is supposed to bring rain is sure to appear effective sooner or later.
   But then it is queer that people do not notice sooner that it does rain sooner or later anyway.

Page 3e–4e:

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   A religious symbol does not rest on any opinion.
   And error belongs only with opinion …

   Burning in effigy. Kissing the picture of a loved one. This is obviously not based on a belief that it will have a definite effect on the object which the picture represents. It aims at some satisfaction and it achieves it. Or rather, it does not aim at anything; we act in this way and then feel satisfied …

   The same savage who, apparently in order to kill his enemy, sticks his knife through a picture of him, really does build his hut out of wood and cuts his arrow with skill and not in effigy …

   If the adoption of a child is carried out by the mother pulling the child from beneath her clothes, then it is crazy to think that there is an error in this and that she believes she has borne the child.

  Over in the Argrath Good/Bad Orlanthi thread:

3 hours ago, Eff said:

Well, to answer these questions thoroughly and precisely: the question is how do you define "god"? This is a very difficult question- are gods immortal? (Devas and asuras in Buddhism aren't, though they have lifespans which may be longer than the duration of the observed universe. The Norse gods weren't, the Ugaritic ones may or may not have been. But the Greek ones were.) Do gods have absolute power? (Answering this question leads you down a rabbit hole in defining "absolute".) There are certainly people who will tell you that they had no concept of a god before Christianity and Christian missionaries came, but their mythological stories and their public-facing ritual practices would seem to suggest that they believed in entities or presences that did the kind of things gods do for other cultures.

And maybe the other end is important too- how small can a spiritual being be before it no longer counts as a god? Lares and penates were certainly gods to the Romans, but domovoi, hobs, brownies, pucks, and the like are in the liminal categories of fairies- but they exist in a Christian context. Even in the non-Christian context of Japan, though, zashiki-wariki and zashiki-bokko are typically considered to be part of the liminal category of youkai. And then next door in Korea, the Gasin/Gashin are clearly gods, though they have formalized names even as they fulfill very similar functions to a brownie. 

But setting that aside, the question of "interventionist" in relation to gods (whatever they are) is perhaps a bit confusing to me. What's a non-interventionist god? Would interventionism mean a god that responds to human appeal in a way that explicitly contradicts the laws of physics, or that does so on their own? That is, there seems to be a kind of assumption that gods and spirits are cleanly separable from natural processes, such that you can distinguish natural lighting from the unnatural lightning of an interventionist weather god. To a very real extent, this begins by defining gods as clearly parasitic or perhaps commensal organisms, ones which are uninvolved with the actual processes but just sit there and perhaps redirect some lightning bolts every once in a while. 

But as far as whether gods or other spiritual entities are good or not... I think that this is possibly the wrong way to think about it, because the more important factor would be that they exist, or that you have a strong belief that they exist. The question of whether they fit into a dualist structure of good and evil is secondary and from a descriptive level, not all that common. To look at contemporary Shinto, which has some degree of developed philosophy on this topic, kami have at a bare minimum an assertive or fierce aspect (ara-mitama) and a gentle or kind aspect (nigi-mitama), which is to say they are neither good nor evil, but more like humans, capable of either. 

As far as ontological commitments go, I would say that all sincere religion at least has the ontological commitment that the religion has meaning beyond the simply personal. This is obviously not necessary and sufficient definition of religion, but it is something that covers the very loose kind of spirituality associated with pantheists, some Buddhists (especially in Europe, the US, Canada, etc.), and some Quakers and Unitarian Universalists, in that they still define themselves to the rest of the world as this, and not an atheist, agnostic, or secularist, or any of the other associations we use to signify that we are not religious, and thus that this has some kind of external meaning. 

This is of course a long answer. I think a short one is that I don't really think that it's likely that someone who sincerely thought that spiritual beings were real, attempted to consult them or ask their aid, and also thought their aid or influence was purely malignant in effect would exist as such, or call themselves a shaman if they did, and that it's not that much more likely that an arbitrary distinction between benign spirits and malignant gods would be central to their worldview but not be evident in this fictional motif (as it's being presented here and in the linked post and in general in these kinds of discussions), which seems to straightforwardly be a kind of disenchantment-of-reality one where all the magic vanishes, not one where one specific kind of magic vanishes but the other three are unaffected or only minorly so. 

… 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:

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The gods break stuff and let chaos into the world (the Gods War, in godtime). Stuff gets fixed and the gods get locked out (AKA the birth of time). Unfortunately, this doesn’t work — sneaky gods manifest within time, more than once — and the hero (it is always the same one) has to repeat the original quest to fix stuff and lock out the gods, again. This cycle culminates in the murder of all or most of the gods. This time the world is fixed for good … maybe.

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?

2 hours ago, Eff said:

Well, to answer these questions thoroughly and precisely: the question is how do you define "god"?

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.

4 minutes ago, Eff said:

Of course, we should probably remember that Greg Stafford attempted to be a practicing shaman

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.

6 minutes ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

So are pneumatic and hydraulic mechanical effects visible in Glorantha?

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.