mfbrandi

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:

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: Page 2e: Page 3e–4e:

Over in the Argrath Good/Bad Orlanthi thread: … 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: 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?

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.

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.

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.

I am not a Campbellian (I cribbed what follows from Wikipedia), but we are sometimes told that Glorantha is built on Campbell’s armature. From Joseph Campbell: a Hero’s Journey: From The Masks of God: Apparently, no one thinks that a metaphor is a metaphor. Why this should be so, I cannot say.

I can imagine a sect of Humakti who are all about calmly accepting their inevitable death when it comes, not about hastening the deaths of their fellow mortals.

And Jeff recently posted this: I sometimes get the feeling that Gloranthaphiles (including the creators) have secret shrines to Orlanth and Ernalda in their basements, but there is a definite strain of the gods must stop interfering or it will all end in tears, too — and there always has been. Of course, the cheesy trope of the gods are powered by mortal worship suggests that there may be less apocalyptic ways to do this than massive bloodbaths every 600 years or so.

OK, Nick Brooke posted that in another thread, but it turned out to basically be this one in a light disguise. And I think what follows fits better here. In poking around, I found this CliffsNotes version of The Hero with a Thousand Faces from Norman Spinrad masquerading as an Orson Scott Card book review (a couple of years before Card outed himself as … well, you know the story). It has case studies — Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination (still Tiger! Tiger! to me) and Frank Herbert’s Dune — and is much more sympathetic to Campbell than I expected from the author of The Iron Dream. It is a fun read, at least. If Argrath were to turn out to be a mask of Feric Jaggar, would that make all of us Homer Whipples? I shudder.

Aren’t Gloranthan elements — except Darkness and [cough!] Moon — more like the phases of matter than they are like our chemical elements? So roughly: Earth = solid; Water = liquid; Air = gas; Fire = plasma. Do they need to be seen as competing for space with the chemical elements in a Gloranthan chemistry? I always wonder which species were supposed to have been around “before” the birth of Umath — and I am sure someone here will know — and whether they had lungs (or even gills).

I took it that: to survive the vivisection and re-assembly you had to be pretty tough already Arkat still looked like a (very scary) human after the rebirth If those points are right — a very big if, I know — then if you are up to the ritual, (a) you probably wouldn’t need to be transformed into a troll to play trollball, and (b) you wouldn’t make a very convincing infiltrator. But I usually have things upside down or inside out; maybe that is because I am in the process of being reassembled into a troll — or an oversized trollkin, anyway. Help!

This should have been Janet Jackson’s comeback: “Never mind my ‘wardrobe malfunction’ — what about the human sacrifice before kick-off? Get things in proportion, guys!” I don’t watch sports. I didn’t know what I was missing.

But a consciously re-gendered Harlequin, no? And for that we also have Moorcock’s Una Persson — but she is not such a psycho, which brings us to the Temporal Adventuress and Woolf’s Orlando and Russ’s Alyx. They are transgressive (just by being women with agency), but not IMO Tricksters, so sadly, we must rule them out — but not your Harleen!

Yes, this has occurred to me, too, but has anyone suggested that Ernalda is part of Orlanth, yet? We are supposed to think of the religion of the Orlanthi as embracing Air and Earth, right?

I recently got rapped over the knuckles for suggesting one couldn’t slide a fag paper between the hero (Orlanth figure) and their supposedly external trickster, but reckless, world-endangering, transformative — doesn’t all this fit Orlanth, too? Sooo … are we playing fast and loose with the concept of the Trickster, or … ?

I’ll root for the eunuch bureaucrat, every time, and stay as far away from heroes as I can manage.

I have no argument with that. They can do “beautiful loser” films — Thelma & Louise; Thunderbolt & Lightfoot; Easy Rider; Midnight Cowboy — but two of those have British directors, the range they cover is very narrow, and they are not tragedies. They don’t have happy endings, though. One of the catches is that protagonists are all disposable from the mainstream perspective — criminals, women, and hippies — and are only allowed screen time on the understanding that at least half of them will be killed off. Is Citizen Kane supposed to be parsed as a tragedy? What about Touch of Evil? Ulzana’s Raid ends with the death of a star, but he is not the protagonist. However, Ulzana himself can be seen as a tragic figure: he chooses to fight the Yankees, but it is only ever going to end one way. There is a classic anti-hero in the cavalry lieutenant, but no hero. Only Ulzana and Ke-Ni-Tay have any agency. Surely, this can be converted into a Prax-set scenario.

I cannot remember off the top of my head what Trollpak says, but as a midwife deity, it would be neat if she had no children of her own body. Hers is a tough love — I believe completely hopeless trollkin are euthanised. She is friendly with Yelm, so presumably she is regarded with suspicion by some Uz.

Why bother to introduce an NPC like Tom and then have them lynched? Let Tom kick off some plot lines and then the PCs may have some views on what they want to do to them — buy them a drink, maybe, as Tom made their lives more interesting/adventurous. —————————————————————— Oops! You said PCs, not NPCs. My mistake. Are you really thinking of having a community leader succeed in lynching player characters for being insufficiently heroic? Or are you just thinking of having them try and fail to light a fire under lazy players? Or … ?

Except, of course, that he fed Orlanth to Wakboth and declared that “The world will remain as it is now, without interference from any god or goddess.” (The grand declaration rather undercuts the idea that he was betrayed by Trickster.) So maybe he is a good human hero — a liberator — but not such a great Orlanthi, even if he does act like Orlanth. Would a great Christian hero feed their god to their devil? I like to think so, but … So there has got to be something to say about Argrath. He is not totally boring.

This deserves a fuller answer than it will get here, but this will have to do for now: You and Shiningbrow are likely talking at cross-purposes: from the point of view of the Orlanthi (characters), a hero succeeds (or at least isn’t seen as marked for a bad end: “follow this guy — he’s a loser”); from the point of view of literary theorists (readers), a hero who fails may be more interesting — and a tragic hero has to screw up somehow. So it may be unfair to accuse them of falling for the Hollywoodisation of the hero. I love the notion of tragedy as Hubris clobbered by Nemesis (Aldiss’s wording and he applied it to SF, but the idea wasn’t new), but does it work for all — or all worthwhile — hero stories? (By this measure, the Godlearners make perfect Gloranthan heroes, which is OK by me.) I take it you don’t mean something as narrow as “the hero is the protagonist and the hero’s pride/overreaching leads to the hero’s death in failure by the end of the play.” That wouldn’t even work for Oedipus the King: he makes the classic error of “I’ll find the person responsible for this plague” but he is not dead by the end of the play. And the hubris may be spread over generations: “don’t worry, we’ll off the kid and then he’ll cause no trouble” — that undoes a bunch of people (Laius first) but it isn’t done by the hero. Achilles’ choice of a short, glorious life doesn’t obviously make him a tragic hero, but arguably that — and being a killing machine — does make him a hero (though, again, there’s the doubleness of the lit. crit. term and the term as understood by the Achaeans). If he is a tragic figure it is not in getting himself killed, it is in getting Patroclus killed. But heroes are always getting other people killed … Anyway, this deserves more and from someone smarter than me.

Thanks for the suggestion, though maybe this would count against her as a Trickster: you wouldn’t want to be or be with Wile E./Crafty Coyote, or Eurmal, or Loki, or Donald Duck. Bugs is maybe the outlier.