scott-martin

Elves and trolls, seelie and unseelie, guelph and goblin, were part of a single balanced symbolic ecosystem before Nysalarkat pulled them apart from opposite directions. This is tied up in the way Arkat receives and repudiates "aldryami" illumination while Nysalor receives and rejects "digijelm" guardianship. One flees the light and seeks the dark. One flees the dark and stretches toward the light. A full year in the vegetable country. This is the game that would have been Shadows Dance but at this point only the mushroom people remember how that was supposed to work. Dwarves remain their own thing.

"Inside the Line was Permanent Full and will be Permanent Full but is not Permanent Full right now. Outside the Line was and will be and is "cyclical" right now. Meditate on this. Are you, as Saint Heidi asks, 'in' or are you 'out,' right now?" - Tight Indigo Trousers ---[ ]--- All zen noodle soup aside (the udon is infinite), I think historical accounts of the Line supporting a permanent full moon operating environment reflect a combination of assumptions and facts about life in the empire in the 1616-25 era. Outsiders who had only encountered the extreme wax-and-wane tactics of lunar magicians abroad (tied to the moon cycle) would have been impressed simply to see what this magic can do when you can count on any level of steady state. Enchantments can get refreshed in perpetuity and you can plan around the effects. You're not on any schedule. Of course you might have to give something up (Etyries transactions are fractional and derivative) in order to smooth the cycle and lock in a particular power level, but to those outsiders who were writing the books in 1616-25 (i.e. bedazzled beard types who rarely get to leave the house anyway) the mere feat of normalizing cyclical magic makes the Line look incredible. Even Permanent Half was so good up in the empire that a rumor got going that the Line supported peak red magic always on all the time . . . and nobody had the technical vocabulary to correct them, so the urban legend made it into print and stayed. However. Even lunar adepts can confirm that the dragonrise blew the transmission network like magical disasters tend to do. It will take time to recharge. Meanwhile the best the grid can do for awhile is Permanent Half, which is not awful (see above) but not boom times either. We are told that Permanent Full will be available by the time the Hero Wars board games get underway. Trust the emperor and the red seers. They're working on it. Now if you need something like Permanent Full right now, you can always burn precious moon rock or seek out a regenerating glow source like the bat. Couple of things here. First, elite members of the lunar establishment have chosen not to generate their own glow. They are happy to smooth their cycle inside the Line but also surrender to the phase table in barbarian territory. "Something's lost but something's gained in living every day." There might even be something corrosive in having all your magic available full strength all the time but I'm not going to slurp that noodle today. The bat squad, however, are full crazy. Whether the Spot causes that crazy or the crazy causes the Spot, again, not my job to explain. It is interesting, though, that at moments when the Line rolls back to Half or flickers out entirely it becomes useful to route the bat through imperial territory so people can get an extra day or two of Full before the tour needs to move on. IMHW glow technicians are about to become a big deal as necessity mothers invention. Dumb Theory: there is also something people call "white glow" but it ain't white exactly.

My thought on the Multiple Malkion Mommies is that this is how a civilization tries to have it both ways. On one hand, they want to present the four-caste system of temperament as universal. But historically, caste boundaries and functions have migrated ("the gunas revolve") and people that come into the system via conversion or conquest need to be sorted. The wives of Malkion narrative helps to absorb the immediate tension without fully resolving it . . . becoming a centre of weird interpretations if not outright philosophical "pestilence." (Now there is one key weird interpretation of my own to swallow here up front: I do not believe vadel orientation is inherited in anything like a continuous line back to the founder/ress. While many people who currently revel in the label were born into that system, it is usually more productive to think about periodic vadel irruptions or revivals that precipitate when the community is under some form of strain. This is why I tend to talk about "vadelists" or "vadelites" as a philosophical sect or cultural repertoire and avoid the "vadeli" with its tribal or genetic connotations. [I am increasingly convinced that the way of "brithos" is a similar overlay and not a fundamental category in itself. But this is weirder and more controversial, hence the square brackets.]) The version in question begins in the allegorical Forest of Ontal. Phlia is the abandoned patriarch's foster mother and ultimately the mother of 30 unnamed children undifferentiated except by gender. They aren't caste paragons. They're just people. I doubt ancestor worship along these lineages matters much. IMG they provide a way to talk about the multiplicity and recombinant diversity of the "wareran tribes" who occupy most of the northern continent and spread to other places. Phlia eventually vanishes once the world is populated and Malkion goes looking for her. This particular version of the narrative compresses his search ("far and wide did Malkion wander") so that almost immediately after Phlia disappears he is "beset by the [v]adeli, who were jealous of his stature and wisdom." They then take him (south) into slavery, where in a variation on the Joseph prophetic motif he has a series of dreams that put him in contact with the divine world and help him invent the caste tools. [I believe the caste tools are more useful as dimensions of consciousness, like tarot suits.] The sequence ends with the sword, the murder of the vadelite king and the flight of the prophet. A new section begins. Aerlit, literally the god of the father, knows that the caste tools are difficult for the first family of Malkion (children of Phlia) to bear, so he sends Yena to be the second wife and bearer of caste lines. While I vaguely remember seeing the classifier "Wambla" elsewhere in the dynastic charts (they may simply be more Worlis), as you note air women are rare in the chronicles so she could be some other type of subtle entity. In this version, caste birth goes Dronar -> Talar -> Zabur -> Gwymir, with Menena somewhere in there too. Note that in this version it is the sword story . . . and not the "scepter" (wand) or "scales" or even the plow . . . that fulfils the series. Note also that because Malkion the Captive only dreamed four tools, Menena has none. Note further that the warrior caste of Gwymir doesn't seem to make it off the island. Here in the modern world most people talk about the children of "Horal," whom as we see married into the family and built a kind of birthright. These people (minus "Horal" of course because the caste paragons are as yet unmarried) together build the city of Malkionwal. After a while Yena goes home and in her absence Malkion has his third wife with the daughter of the local river king, which is where waertagi come from. While I'm sure some people count them as a "sixth" (or even fifth) caste, this particular chronicler does not do this. They remain another people apart. Now what is interesting is that on the facing page there's another family tree titled "Dukes of the Horali." This one has Malkion with his two primary wives and this time the descents are marked. Menena is the only child of Yena who matters in this one. The lines of Phlia ultimately produce Horal as well as the Neleos who founds Neleswal and Hepedal who founds Hepedwal in the south. In this version, as you know, Horal is one of the initial "colonists" or exiles. Froalar, the fourth colonist, descends from Phlia through a female line, Eule who is a sister or cousin of this particular Neleos, as well as formally through Talar. [At this time I do not see much evidence that the talars are exalted above any other caste. This may be what goes "wrong" with the Frowal colony.] There is a strange loop in the narrative where Neleos appears as both the father of Warera Triolina and as the founder of Neleswal. Since the western sea in this version is consistently the sea "of Neleom," I would not be surprised if this reflects some textual corruption or hidden secret that they would rather not leave open. "Neleom" may be a lost inflected form of the name, possibly a genitive or unusual gender situation. The historical Neleos may also have taken a few cues from the hero cult of his nephew Froalar and identified himself with a god. In this scenario, we might start seeing prototypes of rebel erasanchula projected from the dawn age experiments backward into some tumult of early creation: "Xemela" identified with a goddess, the fall of "Dadamus" and the mysterious "Desdoram," and so on. Once they figured out how to embody caste principles through the quasi-shamanic Yena techniques, it was an easy leap of temptation to identify with elemental factors . . . and then through elementary combination fill the world with new recombinant principles. But that's a side note. To wrap up before my conference calls start, I don't think about DANMALASTAN much these days except as a kind of abstraction of how the early castes propagated and came to inhabit the bodies of the children of Phlia, the colonies. Anything deeper is locked in the libraries of absent Brithos and the people of the island do not share.

That is known as "Genealogy, the Brithini," found in the Seshnegi Book of Foreigners (both states). I haven't gotten around to dating it internally but maybe 1967-8? Obsessives will note the "engrion" title.

Yena is apparently an air wife in the way of the children of Aerlit. All four caste fathers and the caste mother are hers. Phlia vanishes at the moment the vadelites emerge and her children also vanish from the narrative (or are transformed), which is suggestive. The children of Malkion have three mothers. The children of Vadel have three fathers.

I wasted precious minutes flipping through my "cursed" copy of WBRM (someone laminated it 50 years ago so the thick plastic pages stick together like old corduroy) so missed my chance to beat @jajagappa to the punch. Wind Children ("Children of the Wind" are indeed in there. As @Eff notes, Newtling "Renegades" are in Nomad Gods, which is I think pre-Perrin. The children of Waertag and the children of Triolina are about as old as it gets. In terms of where they all come from, we should ask Sandy if he remembers hearing anything. There are textual simularities between the Wind Children writeup and some of Greg's musings about relationships between earthy mortals and airy spirits but the early art feels more like someone saw a Led Zeppelin logo. They're cool looking!

Yeah, his overt satanism only incidentally interests me so I'll let people who do more work with the unicorn king weigh in on his motivations and his plan . . . but the flip side of the abjected identity is the collector's urge to recover the full set (and setting). If stamps do not exist in his glorontha he will be forced to invent NFTs.

"Prax" . . . with all its big and little altars everywhere, pockmarked by cosmic history . . . is only secondarily an ecological zone with significantly better weather than the true wastes. It's really a state of mind where you're at home in the landscape and that feeling renders every hill and bush somehow sacred. You can be anywhere and be in "Prax." The shamans just have better records for the part west of the river.

I am not his dungeon master and do not have his strict analytic records. However, looking at the fragmented NPC notes discarded in the wreckage of modern Dorastor I think that whatever he thought he wanted wasn't actually it. He tried that already. It didn't take. If he's looking for company, they are not it. Whoever interests him now is whoever is up there in the castle. Maybe they're it, maybe not. It's a work in progress. The pulmonologists let me keep it. It looks like an IUD on a plastic hinge. Supposedly its only function is to force stronger bellows breathing for the tests . . . the opposite of what you actually want when you're asleep and need to clear the nose for deeper dreaming, so it's funny. We only hear about the ones who come back, who get caught. The world didn't end because some stupid big brother somewhere got so pissed off that his rage called an unbreakable space rock down from heaven. As the line goes, "the ones who return are the ones who suffer" or struggle, the agonists. The challenge is to "live as if you've never lived before." I think of the bite of apple or pomegranate seed becoming uneaten, coughed up in some heimlich hugging maneuver. I think of my favorite line from Kristeva, there is a kind of problem in eating the fruit too soon . . . but maybe it always comes as a shock and the fall is always a shove. What I still enjoy about the two devils collision hypothesis is that you can see the transition in Greg from innocence to experience captured on the wall for all time like a nuclear shadow. Before the moment, everything bad in the world was an abstraction, something thermodynamic ("angels are mathematical") and agnostic in its moral architecture like your answers to a Hesiod reading quiz. After the moment, formerly good people make bad choices and lives are ruined. Greg has thickened. We have wakboth now and nobody talks about kajabor. The puppet show ends with harlequin harrowing hell. What a marvelous thread.

He would be gone by now but would probably do something horrible to the ocean on the way out. This way he decathects at a slow enough rate that the Canal isn't overwhelmed, even if it means tolerating his persistence. This is also Time.

My summer is Mexico's bat season because all their hummingbirds are up here drinking my red sugar water and I rejoice. When they go home again I only have bats to console me and they have slightly stronger tastes.

Once is always free to read deliberately "wrong" in pursuit of wisdom, power or MGF. With that in mind, I would start by interpreting the Block not so much as a gigantic cube of cosmically hard rock but as the way the astral traveler encounters the reality principle itself, the blockage that insulates the world from truly diabolical desire. Because I lead a nice wholesome lifestyle I don't think I know anyone right now who has even seriously tried to contact the forbidden urge . . . I'm happy to keep the Block between me and them, the situation simply doesn't come up. There are no player character cultists of terror and because I am the game master there are not even any NPC cultists of the real wakboth. However, because the return of the repressed is a foundational law of glorantha, there will always be symbolic leakages and other "grisly portions." The primal crime can be abstracted, talked about, even instrumentalized. Someone like a Ralzakark or an Argin Terror works the blasphemous tantra, assigns (cuts up, butchers, "portions") roles in the received drama of the unhappy family. They participate in something like a cult of someone they call the devil. But even that's a mask (a bolongo) for their own family situation, the situation that really matters. Symbolic devils, abstract "unhappy families." The real devil is elsewhere. When that devil is present, creation is not. You're out there. The game is about things that happen on the inside, where creation is here behind the block. There are some other stories like that where for various mechanical reasons the rules of consciousness are suspended . . . outside the law, before the law (kafka reference), beyond the law. The block is solidified law. A paradox in the law illuminated arkat.

Hmmmmmm.

I recall a specific phrase like "then a spirit that had never been important before spoke up" but I want to say it's pretty archaic. Later development prefers to fudge the question of whether or who she was before the Compromise. The mystic link in Troll Gods between herself and relatively profane Aranea (profanea) might be a tempting thread to unravel. IMG this is "pact" or understanding is the mythic basis for how her/their Divine Intervention works, with one representing the other in something like a legal as well as a semiotic framework. ---- Modern "folk" narratives around a theoretical Great Darkness or "Gods War" are not as traditional as the priests think, but are instead draw heavily on the apocalyptic malaise that sensitive participants in the Jrustelan Empire felt for the world they wrecked. In this model, popular characters like "Orlanth," "Pamalt," "Devil" and "Only Old One" who are now deified went through a more literary phase, symbolic forms available to magicians and poets for working through their nostalgia and regret . . . and then in a less urbane era the artifacts of authorship and exegesis are unsustainable, leaving something like a hoax behind. This is best seen when we compare the rhymed "realms of beauty were lost" construction common to Pamalt in RM and the original Orlanth cult writeup to the doomy Jrustelan epigrams that survive. ("Too late too late / to save the dreams.") Prove me wrong! Point me to something authentically cyclopean in the textual evidence or archaeology that we can use to date the historical collapse a full millennium before the Close. Of course there are those who argue that the collapse is cyclical and every dying civilization goes through similar crises: 300 ST, 900 ST, now.

Now that's the hot stuff. I'm slipping!