scott-martin

This "clash of psychic civilizations" model is super interesting. While we might want to bracket caste relief (already available to most of the post-Hrestol west, even unto the island), there might have been other aspects of the teaching that prompted a deep rejection / immune response . . . what Greg sez is that we think Nysalor taught the Ralians (westerners) that "thought is not the only reality, that their Laws were not eternal truths and that instinct was neither good nor evil." This is a direct insult to the blue way in particular so would have confounded their diagnostics and might have even presented perfectly asymptomatically as we would understand it . . . the bodies seem healthy, maybe healthier than ever, but there is something different about the mind that we aren't prepared to treat. A plague of bad thought that then threatens the perceived foundations of their way of life. And of course people with a lot invested in caste compliance in particular would suffer more extreme effects. While I mentioned not wanting to talk much about Arkat here in order to make space for the empire itself, it's interesting that he personally struggled with caste boundaries more than most and so would have been unusually sensitive to the missionaries' offer of radical caste relief. I imagine him as a gifted half-outcaste child in the boondocks training to live up to models of horalite performance that were really unrealistic and unattainable. Then when the plague comes in, the only response he sees is to tear everything down in order to protect the caste walls . . . even as the crusade tears them all down, one by one.

They talk a pretty good game (and modern wannabes on the mainland are eager to believe it) but there are dawn age texts that show a lot of innovation and even struggle on the island in this era. This isn't part of the Bright Empire Interlude because it's peripheral to the question of what the imperial civilization was actually all about, but in some stories the Gbaji teaching enters Glorantha on the island, loses a religious civil war and flees like all western heresies to cause trouble for the Genertelan colonies before the sun stops. This might make Arkat's island illumination either an independent phenomenon of his experience, a trace of the alien religion interacting with the local elf population or some venn diagram option. Right now I still lean toward the dumb theory that being an almost literal outcaste predisposed him personally to see the relationships between competing religious systems . . . I suspect aldrya initiates were mighty rare in the Talar's Army . . . but there might well have been something specific in the elf way that feeds both his consciousness and maybe that of other brithinite initiates. EDIT of course this is all old lore subject to revision and refinement now. YGWV. But Greg was working with these ideas at a crucial stage and it feeds his sense of what Arkat is all about when it's time to put Cults of Terror together a decade or so later.

Love it! Be vewwy vewwy quiet. There is probably enough underpublished material to fill a Stafford Library Gbaji Wars installment but I don't think it's a high priority right now. Maybe in a few years. But back to the lexical gaps for a moment, it strikes me that AT(Y)AR = AR(Y)AT, where the central character is something like the ayin in Hebrew or KH in the plentonian alphabet, unrecognized and elided in some parts of the lozenge. Shadows and shadows.

We don’t know exactly what Nysalor did. None of the changes were concrete: no great art, architecture, cities, or families were initiated. Everything disappeared, as prophesied, when the god was killed, leaving only vague nostalgia and deep-rooted resentment against the killer. Much talk of Arkat sends me back to the fragments to understand how these interpretations evolve and get ahead of where it will go. To celebrate this venture, Storm Bulls get free ransom over on any of the other threads. Just contact me to receive you drink tickets and have fun, boys and girls. You've earned it. Now that we can talk here, what do you know of the Bright Empire beyond what we're all told? What do the specific patterns of erasure tell us about "the pinnacle of First Age history" that held three generations before they finally woke up? What components of the dawn world went in for a blessing and came out bearing a curse, leaving modern chaos garbage behind? I am only peripherally interested here about Arkat, Nysalor, the fine print of illumination and the gbaji phenomenon. Some of you have participated in Broken Council reenactments and can share your experiences. And they say all illuminates were there when the cosmic egg cracked and the light invaded the world. We know they had cities. That elf nations now lost were avid participants, as the Talking Grove prevented miscommunication as long as it lived. Issaries is already present. Lines of fracture persist within the Dara Happa / Dorastor condominium where highness and brightness dominate and in the west, where shadow teachings proliferate to spawn their own enemies. They had magic that could both engineer a kind of sickness and bring the cure. To me this is always psychoanalysis; the early accounts of illumination with its dark side are always mysticism transmitted through Jung. But your Glorantha may vary. Missionary priests in the west are called alternatively riddlers and healers. Perhaps these are separate orders or currents within the imperial system. Only Mallia in modern Glorantha has this ability and she is ambivalently cursed and allowed, sometimes chaotic but open to debate. Chalana Arroy, on the other hand, holds her own secrets because nobody cares enough. Rashorana lives in the Hospital. They were open to the east as well but these interactions have been more perfectly erased, leaving only confused accounts of gbaji veneration in Kralorela, whatever is going on with Atyar (the empire supported "the Thanatar complex in Ralios") and a strange but detailed history of [a] gbaji exterminating the people of genert. A dragon emperor dies in the sunstop and some say he comes back afterward, but who knows? There are bright gods and elves in the far southeast, blue magic too. Arkat and sons never made it out that far and it's beyond troll reach as well. The western chroniclers "from every age" do refer to trolls and dragonewts as krjalki but aldryami and mostali remain a separate and less pejorative class in all but the most conservative eras. Contemporaneous arkatsagas use "krjalk" to describe the true monsters the empire spawns in its decadence. I think this is actually a reference to the chaos feature but that's a separate argument. What is clear is that the bright empire in its desperation resorted to chaos feature and other dark side temptations, becoming the abominations gloomy Arkat saw everywhere. Whatever this magical technology originally did or how it changed is irrelevant. Tentacle outbreaks now can be tracked back to this era. Other aspects of their medical magic may well persist in the undead rites. Look closely at the dark side note in Cults of Terror. When you cut yourself off from the natural cycle you doom yourself to unnatural prolongations. Separately I note that while Arkat himself was indeed secretly illuminated (by elves!) the surviving RQ2 manuscript version does not extend this to his secular third age cult. But this is an entirely different ball game, the true tale of the "Dark" Empire behind what we think we know today.

Some nations we now classify as "human" were liberated alongside more distinctive Jolanti forms and live mostly among us today, enriching our bloodlines and technological capabilities.

Hi Sten -- welcome to the ranks of the green sages and please keep us updated on your adventure. The illustrious Jajagappa has covered all the essentials. I would add this essay of Greg's as a slightly different take on the core mythology. Reading between the lines might get you going down rarely traveled paths. The Mongoose supplement points in a good direction but I think was overly burdened by game design values at the time. More tightly focused material from that author shows up in Tradetalk 7-11 if you're willing to dig a little. It's really as close to modern canon as we have.

They do seem to be extremely popular.

Every forest secret worth knowing either remains unrevealed or is now the common property of every peasant shoveling dirt. On the whole a marginal win so far. The dwarves screwed up by trying to keep everything and so spawned whole nations full of motivated snoops. And someone down there always wants to brag so the snoops keep coming. In terms of tricksters, this is probably a role for aldryami who understand fire, "the rose that takes." As noted above, runners and pixies handle most of the day-to-day shenanigans / shanannigans so the forests can echo with laughter. Does anybody, ah, remember laughter? Some are susceptible to a kind of fermentation that converts the sugars into alcohol . . . growth bubbles over when the fire within gets too hot. Trickster understands that process and can share with a few friendly cults. Only YOU can prevent forest fires.

The known limits of their bromance make this a really useful opening to distinguish "Arkat" as a magical technology from "Arkat" as personal allegiance. Anyone with motive and opportunity can become an arkat technician by incorporating that methodology into the personal practice. Some people will also nourish a personal relationship with the historical figure and his messianic agenda. Some push it as far as they can in both directions. Others stay mostly on one side of the venn diagram or the other. IMG most people pursuing "arkat" experience pursue it as a vanilla hero cult. This is your guy. You're a fan. You study his adventures and try to apply the lessons to get ahead in life. There are compensations. Your cult has friends and enemies. When you see an opportunity to advance the cult's this-world goals, you contribute your resources and participate. There are many cults. The technicians have what we might call a more explicitly sorcerous approach to the material. The Stygians went places and encoded their conclusions in ways we can exploit now to get what we want. The persistence of a historical Arkat is irrelevant. This ultimately points toward a state of consciousness that interacts with the better documented "illumination" you talk about here. Mularik can be a technician who shuffles the letters to see that Argrath maps onto the historical Arkat and doesn't care. A hero cultist would have a conversion experience (model with passions) or some other spiritual moment: this is the guy we were promised. A technician might see a competitor, potential ally, catspaw, whatever depending on the circumstances. In my experience many technicians would view a reincarnated Arkat Actual as a rival and a threat. They're territorial people. So Mularik one day concludes that the guy he's been hanging out with is the guy thousands of people back home have been praying a thousand years to see. He doesn't fall down on his knees and cry. He waves for the check. They're no longer pals. It's on. Struggle of the Magicians. Five Arkats, you say? There Can Be Only One in the end. Now it gets complicated because at the highest levels the ambitions of the cult and the most impeccable technicians converge again. The cult is an easy thing for the technicians to control. And as the formative experience for many technicians, the cult will shape their attitudes and agendas. Then these "true arkati" can coopt, divert or otherwise interfere with the rest. I think this is where a lot of the reportage around shadowy figures guarding key HQ nodes comes from. The problem is when they get what they want in a form they weren't expecting. There's a lot of history outsiders don't see about how the Stygians responded to the Seshnegite threat and ultimately the God Learner Empire gave them what they wanted all along. Some people say that because that history is invisible, it must be sad propaganda losers come up with to feel better: the God Learners ruled the world for centuries, Paslac is a footnote and that's that. I welcome compelling evidence either way but can't help but notice that whenever I encounter resistance on a key HQ node the challenger usually looks, acts or smells more than a little like me in pancake makeup. It's the only place I really see the back of my own head. But I'm just a technician, no dog in the fight.

Love this. It makes the existence of Catseye really interesting as part of the spiritual preparation required to really have the Hill Experience and "see the sparks." I wonder if people with Permanent Catseye are in some way always susceptible to being pulled into Hill interactions, etc. no matter where they are physically. Lantern, maybe not so much. Might be obscure cult dogma here. Hottest lore of the quarter.

Any sufficiently charismatic claim to authority is indistinguishable from birthright when the examiners read the wind right. Some people lean into this mechanism and scatter the seeds around just in case. I love what you've done here: "Enough" is always enough. You get what fate needs. Separately I was just dreaming about how dangerous an unreconstructed Yelmgatha teaching would be in an empire already spinning too fast. Every man a Yelm. Maybe a non-trivial number of women too.

Coincidentally I was just looking at the ancient Cults of Terror story of Rashoran that distills that teaching as "you do not have to be afraid of what you do not know." That's all it is. No ethical gymnastics, pretzel logic or attraction to paradox for its own sake. Just an openness to the alien and the faith that it cannot really hurt you in any way that matters. Since then the teaching has been routed into the service of the self and its passions: "hatred, selfishness, greed and jealousy." By the time it gets to Nysalor, the riddles and other compensating mechanisms are in place to prevent something like the Trio from happening ever again. Maybe it's worth looking at the Argrath in these terms. Still a lot we don't know about the nature of his spiritual liberation + I "coincidentally" always seem to have better things to do than psychoanalyze him. He is what he is, like the weather. Wear a hat if you don't want to get wet.

Now that you two mention it, I wonder if the Flamal Quest ("greater bonus") wasn't really the core of an archaic LifeBQ pushed to the margins of history as the Yelm narrative took over from the Dawn Age. In that scenario, some people might still perform it every year with only the usual hoopla . . .it just hasn't been weaponized in the same way. Of course in the Hero Wars people spinning out of the Argrath mystique might reach back to these primal mysteries. I know I would.

Photographic record checks out.

I like the oncological vocabulary you are using and hope that all is well. To extend the metaphor, there is no ultimate or permanent cure for chaos in Glorantha. All we can do is extend our ability to mitigate its virulence, buying time for something else to kill us instead. The LBQ does a "good enough" job and so is still prescribed today in cases that do not respond to more orthodox forms of treatment. Specialists keep working on refinements that help the therapy work even better . . . we've come a long way since Harmast and outcomes that would have been miraculous a century ago are now routine.

This is a popular interpretation. The Khordavu narrative emphasizes an Antirius restoration and suggests that "preparing the way" for a god named Yelm originates with some religious imperative the Lightbringers brought with them. "-Elm" enters the dynastic lists shortly thereafter and ultimately Erzanelm lays the groundwork for the Sun Swap And Stop in 111,375. I've never asked how exactly Khordavu coopts the Monster Army but it is clearly a pivotal event that ultimately contributes to the Break in the Council. Yelmgatha figured it out and his revelations seed the modern Red Emperor complex. The only real question for us is which "Bright One" he equated her with. I'm thinking Osentalka, which would make her an incarnation of the Nysalor who ruled the universe in tandem with Khordavic Yelm Imperator, much as the two halves of my response here are mirrors.

Yeah, you have a green light all the way unless some lost trove gets discovered elsewhere. I can't wait to see where you end up! 🤣🤣🤣

We're all here to argue about it. Since the alternative would have been worse, I'll call it a qualified win, a compromise. Some of my favorite lines characterize his intent (and his role) a little differently: Orlanth found his mother dead, saw his father suffering and chained between the earth and sky, and took upon himself the task to right the wrongs which had brought such disaster about. He took what tools and weapons he could, called some friends and met others along the way, and thereby joined the Lightbringers who searched unknowable paths to rescue the world. IMG to undertake the quest with the Lightbringers is a matter of atonement. You need to feel sorry and you need to take responsibility for the way the world has evolved around you. The quest is an adventure in search of solutions. In the story we tell, the solution he found was forgiving his enemy and submitting to alien justice for the good of the world. A new sun rose. The world was not reset as though nothing had ever gone wrong. It was only repaired, good to go until the next time. Later a hippie becomes so distraught by the way he sees the world going that he tries something similar. Following in god's footsteps hands him a weapon from the west. We say he has raised the dead or restored the world, or something. The weapon he reached for changes the world and those changes require additional adjustment. Time is a process. Clever people figure out what's going on and weaponize the ritual trigonometry in order to get what they want. Sometimes they succeed and sometimes they only get what they need. I really like this line also:

Beyond what everybody knows? There are two pieces to the answer: what we know we don't know and what we can find out. He is surprisingly peripheral to many of the key texts. The Second Quest is not a narrative concern in any of the Barefoot Sagas I've seen. Greg simply isn't interested enough in that phase of his career and the Heortling chroniclers don't really care. Likewise, at least one of the extant Arkat Sagas ("Pseudoarkat" or the Tale of Seralos Deguy) is completely silent on Arkat's "sons" and posterity as well as Fronela and other topics. IMG this reveals two truths, one exoteric and one not. Talor is not really a universal saint cult so much as a regional hero. He didn't save the world. He simply made a deep impact in this particular corner of the mythic landscape. And because the Fronelan documents are so scarce (lost in various archives if they exist at all) the gnostic truth is that this history has been more thoroughly suppressed than the main Arkat epic or even the life of Gerlant in the south. It's worth a little meditation on why this would be. But the syncretic Book of Gbaji preserves a few fragmentary accounts, including some dates (413 arrival, 415 fall of Nenanduft, 417 for the final Telmorite curse, 419 he takes Kartolin) and a few contradictions. Some say he landed with Ar[k]at from the beginning. Others have him setting out from Brithos in 412 as a kind of imitator or echo inspired by the crusade on the mainland. And of course the original Prosopaedia insists that he was from Fronela all along. There's also an apocryphal, perhaps allegorical account of how he finds a wife, a best friend and a home in Baustin and witnesses the death of Ar[k]at . . . but it's riddled with inconsistencies with what everybody knows today and ends on a cliffhanger that may never be resolved. An enigma, a mystery story locked for someone's privacy and the key has been lost. There might have been multiple Talors drifting in and out of historical focus to suit the requirements of Fate. What's left behind are what IMG are the endless Talor stories, basically Nasruddin gags that corrode epistemological certainties in pursuit of some deeper antilogic. You have to laugh.

On pain of becoming a "centre of pestilence," as a post-Hrestol civilization they were historically acquainted with JOY and caste mobility. He's in the Book as the culmination of the last line of the secret keepers. Where they went with that is a little more complicated . . . there's that great line in MSE where I think you are, "the neat organization was often subverted by individual ambition, by families infiltrating departments and instituting their families and allies into favored positions rather than relying upon the hrestolic ideals of meritocracy." IMG the MGF comes from watching the revolution of caste as the empire lurched across history. The Seshneg-Jrustelan condominium rehearses the talar-zzabur dynamic in various phases while the independent military enterprise tends to consolidate around the ancient horalite titles like "dux" that linger from the Dawn Age. The engrion (MOA) status that dominated Brithos after the dawn is either extinct or ubiquitous, open to all in an age when hereditary succession is not always assured. In such a magically sophisticated society I would expect the foundational minutia to be treated casually, as more or less instructive, diverting or useful mythology with stronger resonance in some places (Hrestol in Seshnela and in a different interpretation Frontem; other founders elsewhere) much as a well educated Macedonian might smile at the notion of a historical Zeus, but YGWV and some prefer to focus on the intervening fundamentalist reforms. There's room for all of it. The weaponization of JOY among the Stygians and others is poorly documented, which is just as well. By the time it gets to the God Learners it's a long way from its origin. Maybe some felt this and worked to reincrudate the concept.

Hi. We appreciate your deliberate omission of "snake" green. As we all know, Erlanda never participated in the dragon mysteries and the green of Orlanth's ring is just coincidence. Keep up the good work, citizen!

For me it raises the question of whether a cult that considers the written word holy (LM, truth rune) would reject counter-factual text as blasphemy. If not, elite cells of Knowledge Assassins who do nothing but doctor books as bait for the enemy. It's a dangerous and ultimately destructive career ("lies murder some part of the World") but the tactical benefits in the Information War are just too tempting for pragmatic big beards to resist. On the other side I suspect much of the real pleasure of eating a book comes from knowing that you're taking those lore points out of circulation forever. But Atyar is still a truth god so knows the difference. We know he maintains "libraries." He doesn't eat everything.