scott-martin

Leon, Stan and Greg are all no longer living authors so all we have to argue with now is the text and other necromantic arts. And each other, of course. But maybe there's an empty envelope addressed to you, slow arriving in the post. Turns out Al Ewing found a stack of them recently and has been dropping them in the box but I digress. And so it is with "dead gods" we can't call up and ask any more. They say Orlanth's father is dead. He can't tell us who killed him or why, in a sorta fairy tale, his atoning (avenging) son brought back some other guy instead. The family won't talk about it, there's always some semantic slide around the dead spot. They said the moon was dead. She apparently got better but doesn't like to talk much about who killed her. It's like all that happened to some other girl. Who needs to forgive Heumath (Yomat), I wonder. Who were the mothers trying to bring back but they got some other girl instead. Surely not all sad families are all that different. There are patterns.

Look how beautiful she is, my toddler crush restored. The psychic octopus, however, is probably an exotic chaos creature ("you one one two, he one one two") so I feel the need to tread a little carefully through the dreamscape without the symbolic mediation of the gods who have built their houses in my head. Let's start with Entekos. Nobody in Glorantha knows that she emerged when somebody called Greg, having isolated the original Orlanth sun god, went looking for the original Pelorian storm. To do this, he drew a face on a sock, pinned a little wig on it and send it in to collect the information. Once this puppet entered the Gloranthan dreamscape, she met the moon, who famously told her that from the moon's perspective the Pelorian storm was a totally different goddess. Sad little sock face, scrunched up around the bones inside. But we must imagine the puppeteer happy or at least satisfied. And the camera pulls back to reveal that the moon was on the other hand all along, Lamb Chop and Charlie Horse did all the singing but Shari Lewis is the one who got paid. We all spent a little time entertainingly and maybe learned something along the way. Is the Pelorian storm the moon? The moon says no. I don't recall what the Pelorian storm said about it (maybe that page got lost), but we're all free to interrogate any god we can access. We can ask her where she ends and the moon starts turning. People where Greg came from had trouble with that direct experience of gods as living entities and instead relied a lot more than we do on received and derived understanding, which is valid in its own way but different from simply being able to open your mouth and ask someone a question. Any Gloranthan with gumption can find a god and start a conversation. You trade some POW and open up a little empty space in yourself for the god to fill. Then you have a little symbolic god to carry with you and talk to whenever you are lonely or in trouble or simply want to know something. You've bought the puppet. In my dream there were three blue puppets because famously Orlanth has three arms whereas Shari Lewis and Greg only had two apiece. Thunderous talked only to priests. Maybe once upon a time he made his first friends openly and directly (godis) but in modern society access is mediated by specialists and the rest of us are barely barntars. If I'm looking for Thunderous, I have to rely on a priest to tell me the truth. Maybe they do, maybe they don't. Your Glorantha will vary according to your level of faith in "theistic" authority. And if I'm looking for a direct conversation with the storm, Adventurous provides wind words that let me do it. Thunderous doesn't have this spell. This is why. Or maybe I'm one of those exemplary people who don't need to ask the storm how it blows because I have a reservoir of that knowledge built up one way or another. This is how Rex operates. Maybe we don't need a third hand for this because Rex is the head. You are the representative of Orlanth in the world now. You're storm dad, operating on the authority of the god within (en-theos-ousia). Vinga, by the way, is a routine of the "adventurous" type. I suspect it's the priests who try to keep her in a skirt and keep the skirts off everybody else. This is why adventurers don't trust priests. The authority of the priests used to be much stronger and is fading day by day as the hero wars blow out all the masks but for now their weight falls more heavily in some gloranthas than others. Let them go when it's time to let them go. But we lost Entekos here again, didn't we? The moon herself said Entekos isn't the moon, and while the moon can prevaricate, in this I'm willing to believe her. Poor little thing was making it up as she went half the time anyway and somehow she pulled it off. Maybe the divine Addi in her little puppet wig simply knew more about Entekos than the moon did, and maybe she knew more about Entekos than she knew about the moon. I think what we actually learned in that puppet show was that the Pelorian storm and (a) Pelandan earth are like a matched pair of stripey socks and that the third sock in the "drawers" is actually Ernalda, the seventh color of the rainbow who is neither a land nor a grain nor a virgin nor a crone. When old earth and the sun commingled they had a son and they had a daughter. The son of the sun wrenched his parents apart in some oedipal (heodipal) spasm and then felt really bad about it because he blamed himself. The daughter of the sun did something else we only found out about more recently when Honeel (heornalda) took the old Entekosiad down from the shelf on a rainy day and really read in. Sorrowful Rausa. Scrunchy sad puppet face. We cannot imagine her happy, can we? The Heortlings today worship the twins: heort, heorlanth, heorlnalda. The -anth is the left sock. The -nalda is the right sock. They are always together like poles on a magnet. We say they're in love. The priests have some convoluted story they tell with wigs and skirts and gender roles but anyone can reach out to the gods directly and find out the truth. The moon says she isn't the air as a woman and canon (priestly authority and direct experience united) agrees with her. While the moon is not Entekos, Heornalda Adventurous might well be the moon, volatilized salt climbing high into the middle air. Is she a "storm" goddess? Someone will need to ask her. I tried but here's the thing: none of the goddesses are interested in being identified with each other. "Guys tried that before," they say. "We'd rather be individuals not archetypal figurines mass produced to swap into someone else's dollhouse. Every guy thinks he's unique but thinks all women are types. Are all happy families alike?" So I stopped asking but it makes a fun story I hope.

MOUNTAINS OV THEE MOON (COUNTING SONG) 1. There is only one wind, a system of heat and kinetic energy exchange that circulates across the world and by "wind," I say consciousness: the one who reads this. [document damaged] 4. Call the wind Œrl and pronounce it something like "whirl." Derive the fractions of the wind thereof: wum, eum [yume], hum, horl, eurln. 5. When the wind carries the no-longer-present in its head, we call it memory. When the wind carries the presently-absent in its belly, we call it motherhood [eurln da]. 6. Every wind ultimately murders his father. Every moon is murdered by her father. This is the pleasure [literally "wonder," miracle] of the wind but generally considered the sorrow of the moon. 7. The fraction of the wind that encounters itself ("rolls its own number") recoils in shame, regret, responsibility thus mothers its own moon as an act of atonement ["utuma"]. This is Œing, the One Moon. 8. Thus are all the pleasures [sorrows] of the One Wind [One Moon] multiplied and the world continued.

Never. But I'm going to run the ball a few yards up the field of forbidden sport, let's see who joins in.

A very dear friend (not exactly pictured, left) used to set off sections of text (it was ASCII times) with a line of periods like an endless ellipse: . . . . . . . One day someone new entered the discussion to marvel, "thats alot of dots!" without reacting to the content (something esoteric at the time about aliens and typhonic cults, pretty gloranthan stuff really) and the phrase entered the vernacular. Alot of dots. Sometimes "toomany dots." I think the real white moon debate season begins sometime after the fire-blasting electric guitar noise of that essay fades back into ambient silence. We're already here. Might as well inhabit the space between the stops. After all, who says Entekos was the wrong air and not the moon? What evidence do they provide beyond "because I say so?"

You are cordially invited to present this thread as teaching credential at the Half Closed Open Open University and register for your stew card, library privileges and of course the upcoming debate season, which should be one for the record books. The only flourishes I would add are that squinting in a poor (red) light is the key to the recognition of ambient POW . . . the first essential step toward collecting it, what we call "errantry" or reification in the west . . . and that sometimes the moon is a man, literally a blue man, as when he deigned to become Artmal (or just impersonate him) and was harried by frightful whirlwind demons on the Running Field of Forbidden Sport. Remember that one? Day + Earth = Storm. Night + Water = Moon. The lightning lightens, the thunder sounds. And the clock in the sky ticks on. Maybe the real cosmic distinction between them is that Orlanth is the one who knows his father. Sedenya famously has multiple mothers but the figure she identifies with (or is forced to identify with) is someone else.

Same difference! Reviewing the youthful presentation in a red-headed context the bits might have originally belonged to other people . . . multiple argrath theory returns in fresh guise, so yeah!!

My intuition here has always been that as he gets deeper into the dragon way a big piece of his posterity precipitated into the Dragontooth Runner pouch and so whenever he calls them in extremis, he's deploying warriors who would have otherwise been fated to be born as his children. This might not necessarily substitute for more conventional fertility (I would hate to challenge Samastina's claims) but it definitely complicates the situation a little. This kind of thing (lineage magic, paternity proofs and mystic adoption) would make a great sidebar at least in the Dragon Pass Campaign.

I think you two are actually arguing the same side, but either way I know the Prax I need the Prax of SPEED

I love the economic orientation here. The thing about Esrolia is there is already a competing brand on the shelf . . . if you identify female there's probably someone within the Gor complex who fits your rage. But maybe not. The thing about the axe women in particular is that you get to be a girl kicking ass among girls. That's what makes you intimidating, that's who you are and you like it. Wind ladies don't seek each other out for cooperative worship. They want to sit with the (other) dudes and when there's a dude thing to be done they want to lend their talents to that task. I wouldn't be surprised if they want nothing to do with getting boozy and bruisy with a bunch of women. Glorantha is still a land of 1000 dances but no matter how that dance ends (you get your own unicorn, Tolat hands you a Baby Bubble, whatever) it is just not your thing. Meanwhile there is always an outlet for women who view the company of both men and women as a distraction from professional violence. We call it Humakt and all it really wants from you is that you sever yourself from attachment. But as a thought experiment, say you have a girl who would obviously gravitate toward Vinga in Orlanth country and transplant her to Prax. Presumably she ends up kicking enough ass (sorry but that's how you do it) to impress the examiners . . . but Waha is not open to "women," so what happens to her? I guess in theory you could kick more ass and go straight to Storm Bull if you're frustrated enough, or sublimate your lack of interest in girl stuff enough to grab that unicorn. Or IMG MGF the Paps will take enough of a special interest in you that you go down and come back a ritually male person . . . or don't come back at all, you just stay there in some specialized role they've come up with for you. Maybe somebody like Red-Headed Orlanth is a form of that specialized role that escaped the Paps and found a niche among the walking people. And this, the lecturer concluded with a rising "secret punchline" tone, is what the empire coopted when they made the Red Hair Tribe.

These are very important scenes to play out in some people's Gloranthas and I suspect as we see more quasi-official material around the modern West the struggle between charismatic revelation and the bureaucratic establishment will become hot stuff. Flying witches. Prophetic nuns. Malkion as a redhead, why not. But closer to home questions like these are pretty easy to answer. Betty Ballista makes it rain. I've seen it. She likes to be called "dad." I get it. She's pretty advanced in our thing and it's clearly working pretty well for her. I'm not going to call her out on getting her roots done because even if she doesn't care too much about the fine points of vinga presentation she can break my arm all the same. Don't embarrass the boss in public. Orthodoxy in many Gloranthan religious communities is like that. You don't have a copy of all the books. You just have the word of the boss you have and the inner voice of the god within. Thread that needle! It's glorious.

"The gods give hints to those they love" and sometimes this takes the form of personal revelation that expands on what the community believes or even contradicts parts of the orthodoxy (canon) that no longer serve as well as they once did. Heroic individuals who cultivate unusually intense relationships with the gods tend to receive these revelations . . . not necessarily "experimental" heroquesting but discovering new connections as their lives evolve. I am not going to speak for Vinga personally here but in the past people who spend a lot of time identifying with the redhead and meditating on the mysteries of Orlanth as a girl have come up with plenty of arguments for why they are right and the community is wrong. At some point in their career, orthodoxy no longer supported their inner experience. Their Glorantha has varied from the outside religious authority. They still get their spells direct from god. They don't show any signs of Reprisal. Maybe they get extra spells to reflect their extra understanding. Many of the characters I know who are like this simply accept that they know more or different than other local authorities. There are multiple routes to god and they converge . . . not everyone learns all the spells in the same order, not everyone understands all the same facts about god in the same way. It isn't a problem unless another local authority says "no, you're getting it wrong."

I do like making them a shamanic list like the taras or maybe more immediately the maruts: just keep chanting names, epithets and mantras until the trance state takes over and you make contact with somebody. Until you make contact with somebody, just keep chanting names. The name that clicks is the person you contact. I wonder where elmalists make room for their parallel god's red-headed girl version. In theory this would be a (Y)elorna but in modern times they seem to have established among themselves (at least at Mo Baustra) that the red-headed girl elmal is also elmal. The storm side seems to have more trouble with this. Maybe historically in "Saird" the red-headed girl storm was absorbed into shepelkirt early and so we see all these efforts to negotiate the raw edges. As for canon, there's probably an uncertainty principle at work where at any given moment in the text we can say what Glorantha is or what she's wearing but not both. Fixed and moving lines. It's interesting to think about in this context here though, since Orlanth as a boy has historically been the fixed line and Orlanth as a girl is the aspect of the sign that resists fixation.

Within such proximity of people talking about pumas, the notion that Ethilrist takes over from the puma people is too tempting to remain silent. A little more seriously, sakkar, basmol and "hsa" (not actually an original hsun chen nation in the archaic sources so possibly a later import, invasion or invention) can all be yinkin's relatives to the exact extent people who care about yinkin care to prove the relationships. Personally I think it's really interesting to contemplate scratchy little yinkin as someone who can draw on the primal terror surrounding sakkar (dinofelis, the pelorian devil who together with digijelm taught them to fear the night). Other yinkinists might dream of reestablishing one of the royal basmol dynasties. But the fact that none of them seems to have tried yet reflects something essential in their nature. The Seshnegite attitude toward cat people is more complicated . . . the magical goal is served when they're kept disunited and weak, so that's how the genealogies were enforced. It can work backward. Nothing says a given phylum or tribe can't be adopted or fostered into a new taxonomy to acquire a different set of magical prerogatives and obligations. Use the weapons of the taxonomists against them.

Ginijji is the Auld Wyrmish form of the modern Ginna Jar, the effaced lightbringer. Has that one been done yet?

This is great. Greg needed to juggle multiple forms of theodicy, thus the competing devils. As you are right to highlight, the western model allows for a more resigned "go gently into the night" philosophical approach but does not allow much in the way of a cosmic compromise. It's brittle, literally unforgiving. When pushed to its extreme, it refuses coexistence and instead rages against death or any perceived dimming of the light. They fancy themselves immortal because the alternative is too awful to contemplate. Or in the north, they consider every experience as a direct communication of the devil (whatever they call him/it/them at the time) with their souls. I wanted to talk about whose local devil "Gbaji" is or was but who has time to get dragged into the minutia of arkatism

Circling back around to thread this needle a little better. The Convergent Devil Hypothesis is challenging to talk about but maybe we start by grounding it in the shamanic moment of maximum existential threat when the outer world is dead and all you have left in there with you is the Enemy (蟲) and whatever else you brought in with you. Some people succeed in this ordeal and some don't. Those who succeed end up carrying some form of survival covenant that miraculously reintegrates the outer world and disintegrates the Enemy back into its scattered petty grievances and irritations. Everybody's Enemy is different. As "I" becomes "we" and communal systems achieve scale, the trace of the initial Enemy lingers around the margins as a local devil. For some people fleeing apocalyptic proto-Prax, this was Wakboth, ultimate expression of everything wrong in their system. They were a "moral" people and so their devil was actively evil, perverse and inherently corrupt. The people of the Neliomi basin called their local devil Kajabor at first. They were a "logical" people and so their devil was a kind of thermodynamic constant with no native moral attributes. He might even have simply been Disorder, the crack that precipitates everything. And there were other local devils we don't talk about so much. In the clash of civilizations that ultimately ended the Dawn Age, some people recognized their gods in other people's gods and the survival covenants expanded. Other people recognized their devils in their neighbors' gods and were confronted with an existential threat. And still others got stuck between multiple devils. Their magicians struggled to identify the true enemy, with various levels of success. As the Gbaji Wars unfolded, some decided in their hearts that Wakboth the goat god of the chapparal was the final devil to coalesce out of the competing "chaos" factors. Others reasoned that Kajabor was the ultimate enemy we all need to fight just like we did at the beginning of all things. Again, some tried to have it both ways and there were (MGF) complicating factors we don't know very much about today. The historical record is deliberately messy. A thousand years later, successful survival covenants have expanded and absorbed their neighbors. Depending on where you're from, the ultimate existential threat can take many forms. Once again, some look a lot like the gods of their neighbors. Hero Wars are inevitable. The alternative is to let the world (as we know it) end, which is again a form of the mystic utuma.

Speak of Dragon Woman and look who shows up! This is a little blasphemous but I wouldn't be surprised to hear EWF identified the earth power with the Green Dragon Star at the center of what we now call Orlanth's Ring. In this version of history, her practical magic stays almost entirely the same but I would give your clan access to some spells that normally only Maran Gor remembers today . . . summon snake daughter is the most important because then if they use it, the spirit will start to teach them deeper things. Of course jerks whose granddad was in the Old Day Tradition or whatever will get mad about it but hopefully the early hero wars are keeping them too busy to really notice what the women are doing.

MG too. You guys have helped me build out a sense of what the "dragon" form of the cult might have looked like at its height that reincorporates some of the odd observations about this particular river without having to go back to the unpleasant question of whether part of the cult is animistic or theistic or even sorcerous. The important part for our purposes here is that at the Grotto the river that leapt as Lorion and plunged as the Sky River Titan found its symbolic way back to the oldest original water. Once it entered the caves (I'm thinking of a literal dark water ride complete with bardo style instructive decoration) the journey that started as rain on the mountain lake ended. Whatever outlets it had were secret and trollish. The water that reemerged as the Marzeel had a different quality and had the more usual land invasion origin and drainage, without quite the same mythic charge (white water torrent, whatever) as the core Engizi. Greg's hydraulic maps being what they are might remember crawling up past the future River bed to become the Creek. This course did not contain (much) Sky River and so encouraged something like normal human traffic down to Karse within historical times. This opens up a chance to explore why the Stream is special, possibly through later engineering along the lines of what became the Janube (or, later, the New River). Dragon Pass retains many secrets that all our adventuring has yet to reveal. But for now we don't need to know. Water being water, there is great confusion of entities and identities throughout. The Grotto and the Great Serpent also preserved deep mysteries of Hard Earth that were extremely important to advanced Engizi cultists. As we all know, Hard Earth becomes the Black Dragon Mountains that provide the Skyfall such an erosion-resistant basin. Down here, everything aspires to the quality of softer and chewier na-metal but even so, blocking the return path at exactly this point is the ultimate injury, cutting Engizi off from all outlets sacred or profane. I don't know what would have happened if the canal hadn't relieved the situation . . . my system hydraulics are in Greg's league . . . but we know it would have been bad. (This is funny for me as we contemplate engineering our backyard water to something that sometimes flows faster and in other phases delays flowing altogether.) Speaking of bad things, Delecti explicitly uses a poisoned weapon to bleed the River at the point that becomes the Marsh. Two poisoned weapons in one myth is overkill. Like magnets, they will converge one way or another, intentionally or otherwise. If this wasn't originally Korang magic, it can be read as Korang magic now . . . and I suspect that, perhaps unknowing, this is what the ducks, talking crawdads, leaping salmon and other post-Kill cultists are drawing on as they try to heal that stretch of river. (Two broken beds in one myth is also overkill. The Grotto was probably sacred to Hard Earth as well and this is why OOO's desperate move is such a betrayal. Seepage from the Print nearby suggests an even larger mythic system at work here.) Like you, I am not convinced there is much historical evidence for ducks (unlike keets of course) before the Remaking. Engizi could have simply reached out to preserve some of his remaining people by transforming them into semi-aquatic forms the Kill would not recognize, much like Jimi Hendrix in the oracular song "1983". Note that crushing the Grotto eradicates the esoteric lower passage and forces Engizi to become more like normal rivers, with a more normal outlet and Homeward phase after the marriage to Esrola is achieved. This is simply another demonstration of how the world is aging. The black galleys might be high and dry until the long-anticipated Flood liberates them for one last sail. Hey, it's the hero wars. I do not know if Orlanth Is Dead interfered with the Sky Fall. My suspicion is that this is a separate "weather" system that obeys its own rules but for all I know the Creek and the River had more trouble maintaining normal flow. Ice pack, at least, was probably insane, so they can run on melt for awhile. This is probably a deep quest for Water Rune people to explore, involving nymphic identification and so forth. And then there are the littorals in the notoriously "tide-wracked" Holy Country where a hex can be land or water depending on the day. The conspiracy minded can imagine Belintar trying to manipulate the Choralinthor and adjust fertility patterns in the process . . . I always liked the idea of him overseeing something like nilotic flood one way or another to keep all those endless Esrolian nomes happy. Maybe when he came onboard the Earth Sixth was facing something like a soil crisis and the shallow Sea Sixth had its own problems with sedimentation that needed to be rectified. Bringing Engizi into a different configuration conveniently achieved his miracles and kept people happy for awhile. I wouldn't be surprised to see the new flow raising new islands in some places and maybe pushing others below the tide more or less permanently. In general what becomes the Sea Sixth seems to have been suppressed under OOO, pushed into a more "stygian" channel or ignored entirely. I don't know if he had a relationship with the triolini. Pelaskites, like most true humans, were probably a little afraid of his people and their tithes.

This really is a great thread. Maybe all this "plentonian" revivalism is actually emanating from the near future. Of course even yelmic marriage in the historical past has gone through phases no matter how static people facing the inside (the administrative elites) want it to look to people on the outside. I like the idea that in various phases dayzatar renunciation was the real goal . . . the devout would accept the transient shame of marriage in order to achieve the greater glory of burning the attachment later. Then in the grand arc of time the monks and nuns became more of a separate vocation, with convents and cloisters being chartered and broken up for various infractions real and imaginary. At one point, Deezola may have eclipsed Dendara as the model of a modern independent woman of the Arcos Valley and beyond . . . but now, not so much. All we need for MGF is for a historian to assign all these moments onto the fortunate succession and watch the patterns play out.

One interesting detail here is that the river is an obstacle to freight in both these places: you need a way across it so the route can continue. We can see the road network. Whatever they are carrying between those esrolian nomes is probably not coming down river . . . and the terminal leg up to Axe Hall makes me wonder if it's as much of a pilgrimage system as anything explicitly mercantile. In that scenario, maybe they want to stay on dirt as much as they can, following the imarjan ley lines or dinosaur tracks or whatever. ("Walk the spine of the earth," dragon woman's ghost told me. And I said, "hey, funny how we never talk about you, dragon woman.") Looking a little deeper, the historical window is critical for any riverboat traders and/or smugglers. And possibly politically fraught. A lot of the deep cult lore got wrapped up in EWF ("dragon river?") and suddenly vanished from the world. Delecti really hurts the river in the centuries that follow, possibly with Korang magic, and then the human cult is completely exterminated north of the Kill. It gets hard for Sky River Titan to reach the homeward ocean and the character of the watershed splits, maybe multiple times but the one that concerns us today is between the upper Engizi (run by plucky duck people and trolls with skyfall nets, big bugs and other exotic resources) and the newly relevant Marzeel keeping Karse going. This is the ancestral route the ducks and trolls know, by the way. They aren't especially dynamic or ambitious. And then no more than a century later, the Lead Hills sever Engizi entirely from its outlet, which is a very bad thing. Belintar achieves a solution. Interestingly, now all that delicious silt eventually flows into the Esrolian orchards and fields. In the process he builds or recollects a new human cult for the river, probably drawing on what they had with Lyksos but amplified and, like the artificial New River passage, engineered to reduce explicit stygian influence among other things. Like many formerly independent religious factions around the Holy Country, the river cult is grateful but maybe a little resentful as well: it owes Belintar a debt and while it's better to owe than to be dead, you'd rather be alive and free. There's no record of Marzeel receiving any consolation. This is a pretty good demonstration of how much he really cares about rivers in themselves. However, we know that the modern river is run by the troll priests at Crabtown, who retain the ancient mysteries and their own stygian agenda. I suggest that their boats are black and bear the mark of Argan, which might not have been welcome when Belintar was around but now who's going to stop them? It's the hero wars.

It's an interesting question. I'm almost convinced that any river cultist deep enough to exert much of this magic on Great Engizi is practically deep enough to just send the boat all the way down the Pool and then eventually drop back on the Sky Fall ready to start the downstream cycle fresh and maybe carrying strange cargo. Naturally that's a whole lot of magic, but at least at no point are you going against the will of the creek • stream • river. And going against the flow is not what advanced river adepts do. I don't think Belintar explicitly banned profane shipping on the New River but he might not have even seen the need. Maybe things were different in ancient times.

Thread . . . . . . Escalating Quickly . . . (Revealed Mythologies, Book One) IMG this is how the world is persistently reborn so just make it a beautiful baby, some new hope for the future snatched from hell. More later. Backford deserves to be a weird place. We must imagine Norayeep happy.

[response too large for thread / MULTIPLE DEVILS EXEMPTION DETECTED] Now that you mention it, Kaldar + Sinjota = KAjota(R). The twin guardians of the gate together add up to something like entropy, the erasure that threatened before death and time. In their own place, following their proper function, they aren't necessarily a problem. It's only when their prerogatives are resisted or the system (machine) around them breaks down that they flow together into something more apocalyptic. But "Friend of Man" is a tell here because we usually associate it with Eurmal directly and not with some secondary (burta) figure. This is northern Eurmal, the clever god who liberates fire for mortals in a cold world. He has more of the attributes of southern Orlanth (who does not appear in these tales), being a warrior as well as a troublemaker. Squinting, he could have taken care of both guardians of the gate on his own without doing much more than changing his hat and pitching his voice differently. If Yomat is the friend of man and also death, then this might be a survival of the original northwestern understanding of why "we" die when nearby immortals (notably the people of Brithos but also dwarves, altinelans, luatha etc.) do not. Yomat in this reading is something like Pandora's box, superficially a curse and a heartache but ultimately a kindness that allows stuck souls in damaged bodies an avenue for change, transformation, growth. We make mistakes so we can learn. We fall so we can learn to get back up again and we die so we can start over. This is a little different from the more familiar archaic western division of the "Orlanth" attributes between Eurmal and a figure once called Humakt . . . "the storm god, chief of the gods, wielder of the thunderbolt and bringer of rain" or more simply "god of the air" who forced earth and sky apart, quarreled with the sun and changed the world. Obviously this reminds us of someone else. At this stage, he is not Death and Eurmal is not explicitly the Thief of Death either. Those relationships are explored elsewhere. And so it's interesting to see this transitional version where the epithets are shuffled a little differently. Maybe in this version "Orlanth" was death and his story played out differently while Eurmal and "Yomat" stayed a little closer together. Or all three of them reflect aspects of some even more primordial air god no longer worshipped within time but still recalled dimly in the far north and west. By the way, in this reading Kaldar and Sinjota may be equivalent to "Nakala and Tolat." Tol, the primeval red "moon," is a strange god, broadly identified with death. If so, he vanishes from the genealogy at this juncture while Nakala ultimately produces a child who is also a secret who is also a gift. Her sorrow in later iterations of the westfaring may only be a kind of echo of the original bereavement, a kind of mythic stone tape.

(Y)uma(k)t. If you're seducing one I would give it Death and Truth, maybe a touch of what we call Disorder. Getting the "baby" back to the surface is probably not a challenge for the trickster in question. The challenge is figuring out how to have a relationship. Great thread!!