mfbrandi
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Everything posted by mfbrandi
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Isn’t Silence the Void cast in acoustic terms, just as Darkness is the Void optically? And I am left-handed, after all.
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Surely the traditional view is that they do (black hole information paradox). This upset physicists who like everything to be reversible. I believe that there is current research that suggests that they don’t after all.
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He fell ill in the USA in 1949 (visiting Cornell) and got the diagnosis of prostate cancer back in England on 25 November 1949. I imagine he must have had the cancer for some time before the visit to Cornell. He died in April 1951, so not a few days after the diagnosis. I don’t know whether things would have gone better for him if the disease had been caught earlier or whether it was ‘his fault’ that he didn’t get an earlier diagnosis. Off topic? Well, a little biographical excursion on a thread on LW’s take on magic is OK, isn’t it?
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Thanks. I had seen a Battle of Heroes reference, but didn’t have a date. Argrath and Ethilrist must have clashed before, as the KoS section on that battle gives us this (which happens before the battle proper, with the death of Jar-Eel): Footnote 69 says that the best friend was “an unknown individual” — though I would have guessed his best friend was Gunda — but this is KoS (even if 2nd edition), so take that with a [pinch|bucketload] of salt. However, it does explicitly say that Gunda helped in the later actual battle: … whether she survived it and whether Ethilrist was there, it doesn’t say (though you would think he’d be licking his wounds). The Guide doesn’t help: it has a lot of the KoS text but in a different order, making it seem that Harrek marches against Ethilrist after Argrath pulls the Wolf Pirate protection racket on Kethaela — but the KoS order seems to make more sense. WBRM/Dragon Pass might help, but I don’t have that. Then, after Jar-Eel’s seeming resurrection (or a variant text not recognising her death at the Battle of Heroes) and Argrath’s marriage to the Queen of Holay, there is another confrontation, precipitating Argrath’s Lightbringers Quest: After Sheng Seleris is retrieved from Hell (and returns to his people), there is the Battle of Dantolfol (trad. date 1680, revisionist 1646), where: … and there my Argrath vs. Ethilrist references run out. So from Erol’s point of view, we want to know about the pre-1628 clash. With any luck, it is undocumented and can be whatever suits.
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Nonetheless, I think @soltakss is correct. Obviously, we don’t care about the other three accounts, just the first one (CoT, p. 11): And in the write up of the mythos of Primal Chaos (CoT, p. 24): You say yourself that the Void is “that seething nothing of unfettered potential” — isn’t that “the untainted power of random change” by another name? The crack in the world doesn’t create Chaos/the Void, it just reveals that noumenal reality which draconic creation had hidden behind the barrier of phenomena (i.e. the world). And of the “Devil” (CoT, p. 13): As for the “lies” of the Lunars, the Lunar Priestess says (GoG, Talking to the Moon Woman): Very dull. I certainly hope the first bit has been retconned away, but anyway creation myths don’t always start at the beginning. The second part fits well enough with the nature of Kajabor. So how about Kajabor, the Black Hole (which is maybe (Primal) Darkness, which the Uz tell us has always existed — GoG, Tales of the Night Hag), the Void, the true death of gods, Chaos, the Malkioni Zero, the destruction of information, and your unfettered potential all being the same thing, that which has always been, is not at all, and which lies beyond the veil of Maya? To touch it is illumination and extinction. If Orlanth is the big I am puffed up with the wind of his own self-importance, you can see why he hates Chaos, the ultimate deflator, the infinite Void into which he will vanish as if he never was. But after a suitable course of treatment, he will open his third eye and let go his last stinky breath, finally blown out. From Chaos we come, and to Chaos we shall return.
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There was an earlier period of service with the Lunars: I don’t know whether there was a later one. Possibly. ——————————————————————— Edit: Harrek and Argrath definitely fought against the Black Horse Troop, so Ethirist must have been on the Lunar side again, but I don’t have dates at the moment.
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Sleipnir
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Sorry, I was just being mischievous: treating the world of time as “our” only real world and playing on the myth’s coming at the beginning of early RQ rule books. We had to wait for the myths of the really early universe till when, Cults of Terror?
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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?
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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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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.
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How are we supposed to understand Gloranthan divine magic?
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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.)
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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.
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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.
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Or maybe the god’s will is done — as it always is — for that is what the unfolding of history is, whatever it contains.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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No, it is fine: if you want to say something else, go ahead. All contributions are welcome.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
