mfbrandi

I am now picturing a very angry badger with three eyes — probably equally erroneously.

Wikipedia does seem to cite a source saying this, but it is potentially misleading. That is about 1,000 years too early for Babylon as we know it: “There is little evidence that Babylon was anything other than a small town before the Old Babylonian period (1800-1600 [BCE]).” (Gwendolyn Leick, Mesopotamia: the Invention of the City, p. 249) Rivers had to change their courses before Babylon made sense, apparently. The empire, the biblical stuff, the twirly beards — that’s all much later than 2800 BCE. Which is not to say there wasn’t soap in Mesopotamia in the Sumerian Early Dynastic period. But it doesn’t matter, anyway: definitely have the Dara Happans sneer at the Orlanthi for putting their soap in their hair — they probably think it turns it red — how could you pass that up?

What about Argan Argar? If you like trinities, Argrath and Argan Argar can be Arkat in his carnival aspect as Arkat the Stooge/Arkat the Shill — along with Eurmal the Geek and Arachne Solara the Puppeteer — who at least looks like he has no idea what is going on when Eurmal lets go the net, climbs on it and goes into labour.

Religious significance of the game: it is a trollkin deathquest, perhaps; the ball is the god who suffers and dies (repeatedly) to save the world or even to give birth to it. But that would be a deep XU/ZZ cult mystery — not for those who want their trollball to be KL-trollish.

If Eurmal is Wile E. Coyote (i.e. Christ crucified), are they also that child in “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”? They are certainly Prometheus having his liver pecked out, and IMHO Zorak Zoran screaming in pain and fear for eternity. So just how well do the Orlanthi treat their tricksters, all things considered?

Yes, I would think so. Running with @Joerg’s joining of the myths of the discoveries of Fire/Light and Death, and my proposal that Zorak Zoran is the mother of Aether and a very old god — one of the first to emerge from the primal Darkness/Void, let’s see where we get … The old write-up of Eurmal in Storm Tribe (pp. 59–74, including Harmast’s Lightbringer quest which brings back Arkat) — although it is distorted by being from the perspective of know-nothing Orlanthi — is suggestive. In this version, Eurmal is the mother of Yomat (per Loki and doubtless other tricksters): “Eurmal seduced Sinjota at the Lower Gates, and later gave birth to the god Yomat.” If we buy @scott-martin’s Yomat=Humakt and if Humakt=Death (just as Mostal really is the World Machine, not its maker or machine minder), then Eurmal is the mother of Death — it is in this sense that Eurmal brought Death out of Darkness. So contra my previous suggestion, that would make Eurmal the Zorak Zoran figure in the myth (although doubt is certainly appropriate at this stage). That is OK: they are both crazy and they are both knowing, and it is what they know that drove them mad; they both have the Disorder rune; the Illusion is of course three eyes, as written across ZZ’s face; they are both hugely powerful and not to be trusted; they are both killers. Also, as we know, Gbaji=Arkat=Zorak Zoran. In Storm Tribe (p. 62), we read: So it begins to look like Eurmal=Arkat=Zorak Zoran. We know Eurmal was sponsored by the Godlearners, too (see that other thread), and in Storm Tribe’s account of that, we learn that Eurmal is self-fertile (p. 62: “He even created a ruling family by mating with himself”). Add Argrath and the Devil and it begins to look like Eurmal is there at all the Age-ending thinning events that I so like to bang on about. So Arkat Humaktsson is beginning to look like Arkat Humaktsmother, but if Arkat is the man who folded himself per my notional Arkati pantheists, that is just the sort of loopy nonsense we should expect to see. (But you know, parent, or “I am become death, shatterer of worlds”?) Should any doubts linger, let us take a look at some of Eurmal’s epithets (Storm Tribe, p. 70): Deadeye the Death-Finder “opened Orlanth’s shadow-eye” — i.e. offered illumination, which Orlanth rejects, as he does not become a “Flesh Man” (admit his own mortality) Downboy the Lightbringer Prometheus, friend of mortals (“men”) and possibly their creator (Arkat Arkatsmother) Hisfault the Scapegoat Gbaji/the Devil: representing the externalisation of the chaos within by non-illuminates Killer Boy the Destroyer Arkat and Shiva, the Supreme Lord who creates, protects and transforms the universe — and I always fancied Arkat had a bit of Ashoka in him The names are lame — Orlanthi, eh? just look at their poetry! — but the rôles are about right. But if Zorak Zoran is revealed to be one of the truly great gods and he is only the shadow of Xiola Umbar, his “sister”, where does that leave her? I know Aranea is still generations off, but we can posit the spider as a pre-existing Darkness form, as Arachne Solara is surely no daughter of Aranea. Arachne Solara, the sun spider. Xiola Umbar, Yelmfriend and keeper of the secret of the light within. It is hard to resist, really — a spider would make a great midwife: plenty of arms, and all that silk for sutures and swaddling. And if the baby cannot live? Suck the swaddled bundle dry and recycle — the Uz would approve. So is Arachne Solara really the mother of Time, or is she the midwife of Time, Time being born from the body of a screaming Kajabor/Wakboth/Eurmal? It is not for mortals to know, perhaps, but in the dark the illuminati enlo whisper to each other that Zorak Zoran was Xiola Umbar’s shadow even before there was Light to cast it, so not even a trickster’s shears could separate those “two” — and they chuckle. (And if you cannot find Lunar themes in that tale of cosmic balance …) Coda (Storm Tribe, p. 60):

Hmm … In that a gift enters the world, but it is a gift that can be frightening and can be abused? Yes, but Three Curious Spirits is cosmogonically earlier (Light precedes Death) and is also about what one brings to the gift and the consequences of one’s approach — it is a cautionary tale: forewarned is forearmed. (Airhead Orlanth thought it meant forewarned is four-armed. He is a natural blonde, he just hennas his hair.) Is there a version of the Sword Story (discovery of Death, retold here (@soltakss), rather desultorily here (Robin Laws), and doubtless elsewhere ad nauseam) that brings out this tripleness of approach? Arguably, Orlanth is two-dimensional and unenlightened (AA), Eurmal is deep (XU), and Humakt is damaged/a warning to us all (ZZ). If not, perhaps you should write it, @Joerg.

Sure, but as with Yomat, Death is friend to men — even dark men. Illumination is stepping off the hamster wheel of rebirth/desire and facing finitude as a thing to be embraced. Unlike Chalana Arroy, Xiola Umbar is not hung up about death. (And maybe there is a trollish King of Sartar in which the Fourth Age survivors are all Uz. After all, we are all Uz — or possibly Enlo. Haven’t seen any trolls lately? Haven’t looked in the mirror.)

Eurmal cultists have bought up a load of oversized furniture from Peter Jackson. And a job lot of deceptive animals. High llamas rebranded as vicuñas. You get the idea. Snow White is an Agimori, a young giant … or a great troll in a wig? They use all this to make humans insecure about their height: “You are about to be thrown out of your clan, Steve. They are all laughing at you, Steve. Don’t worry. Put on this cheap dwarf costume genuine Mostali clothing, and pray for cargo from Mostal. You will know it when it comes: all the crates are labelled ‘ACME’. Snowy here will show you the ropes — give us a twirl, Snowy!” Snow White: “You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve. You just put your lips together and blow. Here’s your pick axe. The Krarsht complex dwarf mine is that way.”

Well, Wile E. Coyote seems to survive on a diet of never-caught roadrunner despite his frenetic lifestyle. Must be a lesson there.

But this isn’t mad: it is that thing inside you which you can benefit from, or you can fight it and it can burn you. IFWW locates chaos within, too. (If trolls don’t make a big distinction between chaos and light — they are agin them — for Yelmies, the Bad Thing is darkness. I thought GRoY was going to be “chaos”-free, but there was a single occurrence, disappointingly.) In Earth traditions (I read somewhere), there are claims about the dangers of meditative practice: you get better at it, and then you reach the bad trip stage of being beset by demons; some people get past this and closer to enlightenment, but some get badly burned.

If we have Arkat as a creature of myth, not history, I would just say that he is Zorak Zoran and the earliest manifestation of Nysalor burned its way out of him. If we go the experimental heroquesting as Heinleinian/Gerroldian time travel, we can have Arkat as the well-and-truly bootstrapped man who folded himself: there will be no telling which came first the A or the ZZ — our boy will be all through everything. Never mind Arkati henotheism, the deep stuff is Arkati pantheism: I am Arkat and so is my wife, but we are all Uz. (Or we make that the myth and drop the metaphysics.)

I Fought We Won is in Trollpak (Book 1, p. 8), so I think we are absolutely supposed to think that it is told in Uzland: Sometimes, the Great Compromise is viewed as a gentleman’s agreement between the gods — think of the Olympians saying, “I won’t interfere in the Trojan war if you don’t” — doubtless all with their fingers crossed. But there has always been this other strand of Gloranthan myth where the gods really are beyond reach: thrown into the black hole and beyond the event horizon. According to this strand, Gloranthan religion is much like Earth religion: the gods don’t answer, because they cannot — although in both worlds there are still religious language games of petitioning the gods with prayer, even if no one really understands them. (That magic works in Glorantha proves nothing: see sorcery and mysticism.) That’s We Won — and it can be psychologised: I leave my disordered state/attachment to the impossible behind me and I accept the mundane world, the only world, for what it is. Damn, these are definitely some ’70s West Coast trolls! They’ll be doing cold yoga, next. I Fought is clearly facing the chaos within oneself — or illumination by another name? — and not in a literal sense going beyond the event horizon and returning. So there is room for religious sophistication in Glorantha — “it is a category mistake, darling” — and the Westerners’ unreachable Invisible God and Mostali pantheism are responses to the same religious reality as beyond-the-event-horizon polytheism: you will not trip over your god sleeping off a bottle of meths — Orlanth won’t touch any other liquor; Vinga told me so — in the shopping mall. In light of this [sorry], perhaps the light within is also a cautionary tale: XU is the chilled, sophisticated believer; AA shrugs off theology for the joys of the secular life; ZZ is the religious maniac who is too crazed or too literal-minded to stop beating up on the inhabitants of the mundane world — he didn’t read his Nietzsche, but he knows the Lord’s Prayer backwards. Of course, you could play the gods’ “stasis” as that is not dead which can eternal lie, but I think our lords and masters have another game for that. Or you could have things like the building/hatching of Nysalor and the apotheosis of the Red Goddess as putting cracks in the traditional faith of IFWWers: “THIS isn’t supposed to be able to happen.” Of course, I read that the Mesopotamians distinguished between (proper) gods and deified kings …

Call me a dirty stinking cladist, but I have no problem with a common ancestor for trolls. That is not to say that there was an ur-Kyger Litor cult — the Uz may have invented ancestor worship independently many times and then syncretized to get the modern KL cult/religion. Religion is definitely the Johnny-come-lately diabetes-inducing icing on the cultural cake, let’s get flint knapping and lead chewing sorted first.

Well, it is explicitly a Darkness myth but it is a secret, and I would be careful which trolls I told it to, unless I wanted to be eaten or beaten. I could imagine devotees of Xiola Umbar Yelmfriend telling it to Solar and Lunar mystery cultists of a shined-upon bent. In Uz country or Dara Happa, it is definitely NSFW. There are a lot of religious bigots in Glorantha more widely, and this could upset very many of them, I reckon. (I am now imagining an “army” of illuminated trollkin with their password of Jai Bheem and their very own Ambedkar. Could they make common cause with White Moonies and a splinter group of Chalana Arroy?)

Yeah, they can darksense a mountain(!) over kilometer away, but not a person (unless that person is Gonn Orta). Yes … but what can they see at that distance if the light isn’t too bright or too dim? I dunno. For the mistress race, nothing, I suppose. For trollkin? Darksense was the fun thing, so that got the wordage and the thought. I bet the Mostali have sonic countermeasures to “blind” Uz darksense.

XU is friend of Yelm. Possibly, the midwife of Yelm; possibly, more than once. Look at it this way: Light/Fire/Sky is born from Darkness. (I am going to keep “Aether” just to avoid some typing of slashes.) One of the religious things Glorantha takes from Earth is devolution/successive generations of divine powers. On Earth, this is presumably a way to explain away the cults that your culture wiped out or absorbed: “Oh, them, they were the titans/the parents of my supergod; the story goes like this …” In Glorantha, we are supposed to literalize more stuff, but maybe it doesn’t make a great deal of difference to the myth. Given the devolutionary theme and the disintegration of Yelm, I think we can say that Aether contains all the potentialities of the element, including Rashoran/Nysalor/illumination in its most concentrated and potent form. In the devolution/disintegration of darkness, our trio of spirits is very close to the Ur-Darkness: theirs is the Ur-encounter with illumination (unless Aether had already illuminated itself in the womb). But don’t ask which manifestation of Aether each bumped into: Darkness is the womb of Aether; each looked inside themself. The third eye is the light inside burning its way out. If you like, Zorak Zoran is the mother of Fire (and the rest): he didn’t steal fire powers, they were in him from the beginning: Aether is his firstborn. Of course, for PR reasons, neither trolls nor Sky cultists want to put it that way: “He stole fire from the big YO!” “Yeah … he stole it, that’s right. He wasn’t pregnant with it or nothin’ – nosirree, Bob!” AA the affectless father/birth partner protected by his shallowness — he is not called “the god of surface darkness” for nothing: he is two-dimensional. If ZZ is John Hurt, then maybe AA is Ian Holm. The secret of the light within is that not only was Light within Darkness, but it still is — at least within XU and ZZ. Trollkin have better eyesight than Uzko: maybe that is one of the reasons they like XU and her gentle light. Maybe the reason XU feels responsible for ZZ is that she didn’t do such a good job midwifing the birth of Aether. Argan Argar has no interior, but he managed to be reborn into the light — via Xentha — rather than carrying it within him, and he has done a pretty good job of adapting to the Hurtplace. In his way, he is as impressive as XU and ZZ, but possibly not as interesting, except geometrically. Right, I had better read the rest of your post, now.

Yeah, but, no, but … they are long-sighted, so out of sight is supposed to be further away than “out of darksense”. Looking at Trollpak the other day, I wasn’t clear where sight took over from darksense, but distance is a visual thing (if a bit grey and blurry — I bet they don’t see red a kilometer off), not a sonar thing. Big yawn — it is really just a set-up for an old WF-type dark troll joke: “Out of sight, out of mind . . . and for the darkness peoples, ‘out of mind’ isn't really all that far away.”

And indeed, the hurt of Hurtplace. This would suggest that to fulfill its allegorical function, trollball is played in enough light to be uncomfortable. Well, I did tease you — with diagram — way back when. Actually, I had wondered whether it was a typo and you meant “formerly” — as in booted out for suspicious Lunar shenanigans.

You can make it so. Now Gloranthan masons — free or otherwise — they might have a nice little paranoid cult, with closely guarded secrets (some of them useless) … Genuinely useful tools could be passed off as mere religious paraphernalia. Is it recorded who human masons worship and how? Is it secretly a Mostal cult (no divine magic required), but scorned by all the Mostali (and most of the dwarfs) who have figured that out? An earth cult, as they are definitely on the square? Could be a non-Western monotheism or pantheism (arguably, Mostali are pantheists).

How many copies of The Coyote Gospel does this temple’s library contain?

Err … yeah: not descended from Kyger Litor or Dame Darkness (per latest genealogy — and this fits older material, IMO). This goes for Xiola Umbar and Argan Argar, too. IIRC, they don’t have the man rune, either. They are straight out of Darkness (although Argan Argar was born again later, but still not in KL’s line). They are depicted as trolls because — many/most of — their worshippers are Uz, no? Contrast with Karrg, Vaneekara, Jakaboom, and Korasting & her children. (That is my take, anyway. See also, this thread — where @scott-martin promises fresh revelations … at some point.)

@scott-martin and I kicked this about a bit, recently — which should be warning enough for most not to read on. Only the bad ideas in the following recap-cum-ramble are attributable to me. Yomat = Humakt. IIRC, iron was created to “carry death”. Yomat–Humakt is the friend of men because he brought death to the world. (Humakt “inherited” death from Eurmal, and perhaps that is as seriously as one needs to take Eurmal’s begetting Yomat.) “Friend” is not merely ironic, as death is the agent of the progressive thinning of Glorantha through the Ages, leaving short-lived humans dominant in the Fourth Age and the troublesome gods and elder races dead or gone. (A trickster-centric fantasy ought to read against the grain.) If the iron connection leaves those adorable time-travelling robots fighting their incomprehensible change war as agents of thinning, that would seem to fit the original conception of the Mostali. (If your captured putative Mostali has organic components, perhaps it is a cargo cultist — or an anti-semitic stereotype on the run from the Ring of the Nibelung.)

Plans and maps are different in this respect: the plan shows how it ought to be, the map (in the sense under discussion) shows how it is (or how to get around it). I don’t know what the historical reality is, but I wouldn’t be surprised if “accurate” and detailed plans preceded accurate and detailed maps. Think scores versus transcriptions: they may look the same (when done well) but they are different — the output of different processes. Or use a pantograph to copy maps? I know that isn’t bronze age technology, but if Hero of Alexandria actually had it working in the first century CE, that wouldn’t seem to break the not-really-bronze-age tech level that most people seem comfortable with in Glorantha. (And yes, this doesn’t do the same job as the spell, which could still be useful, but it is a first step toward mechanising reproduction, although it doesn’t prevent errors of omission.)

Mostly, these are the stupid, aggressive giants who partake of the disorder rune, right? So although they are said to be there to enforce the rules, I take it that is a joke, and they are there to deliver random acts of senseless violence. So the trolls won’t want the lighting to be too good … when their team is near the referee. Is there enough light that the red zones look red, or is the wetness of the blood enough? I was wondering why any trollkin would want to be a spectator. Rule 8 says that the players may not harm the spectators in any way. I have a horrible feeling that it wouldn’t occur to anyone that this included trollkin. When we are told that the centre posts are important and “house the esprit of a team”, I guess we are meant to take that literally, so where do the spirits of — bound to? — the posts come from? What if the post is a motionless troll? That might help with religious significance. And just who gets sacrificed to these posts?