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scott-martin

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Everything posted by scott-martin

  1. Heh. The great Peregrin Dirim, speaking of that time Achilles was a girl. So far this season has been all about the fledgling so momma has mostly kept to the north and left these easier meadows to the little one. We hadn't seen her since last summer. But I think the question of the avenging sister is similar to whether spirit cults are bounded by locality. Some spirits enjoy one "gender" performance or another, just as they have favorite colors or foods or styles of music. For others it's just an accident that doesn't concern them, something for bodies. Space is like that. Death is like that . . . the masculine portion of time, whatever that might signal. Sometimes it matters that Yelorna isn't Yelmalio and sometimes it makes no important difference between Vinga and Orlanth. We're lucky in that all of these questions about spirits have easy answers. We can poll them and look for patterns. This is part of the story of spirit cults, how they concentrate and spread. Sometimes there's no need for an oasis spirit to travel. They don't socialize. Sometimes what they really wanted was for someone to carry them out of the desert to a place where they can stretch out a little. It gets cramped in the turk. You need a certain kind of chess contortionist to really pull off the trick.
  2. Not yet but I am always hunting something new and fresh, like some kind of ageless + eternal spirit (or story) constantly circulating from skin to skin. On the other hand, there is always the risk I'll just crap out and watch Alexander Senki again. Can spirit cults be contacted in more than one location? The mechanical turk (like one of Aristotle's hunter-killer mecha or the weird mutant forms of the pythagorean cult) travels from place to place but myths spread virally and so the rites propagate across the world. If enough of us work the rite simultaneously and the spirit appears to all of us, clearly the spirit is now something more like a god. The only way to (WOAH, sorry, big peregrine just sailed close to the window) know is to get some friends together, try it and compare notes. Otherwise, a traveling shaman can map the world in terms of how far each known entity can stretch, paint the lozenge in ocher colors like spiritual countries, find the boundaries. Make the countries "holy."
  3. The Graves version in particular is Pure Gloranthan Gold complete with "California stoner surrealism" or whatever they're calling it these days. See how Graves frames cult entities like nymphs and centaurs that other games struggle to cram into a monster manual. Do it like that.
  4. This is essential to the animistic relation. Bodies in themselves are mechanical shells, an ornate but empty vehicle. We are fortunate enough to be spirits with access to a body, like conventional chess players. The spirits most eager for contact tend not to be embodied. They're great at chess or whatever magic they do, but without a body of some sort it's hard for most of them to manipulate the board. On the other hand, no physical extension (no SIZ) means all space is one to them. Of course many have preferences, allegiances and allergies in terms of locale, climate, "set and setting." They manifest independently in certain places and not others. Some find certain environments too antagonistic to endure . . . contact efforts will be seriously resisted because they simply won't fit easily into the vehicle you have available. You can't summon fire elementals at the bottom of the ocean, for example. The chess player won't squeeze into what's available. But subject to these parameters, if they give you their name, you can travel and still call them. And of course what's interesting is the stereotyped or "rote" behaviors that many spirits will exhibit, like rude programming. At least until you really get to know one as an individual and interact with it across a wider range of settings. [ὁ δὲ Θαμοῦς Αἰγύπτιος ἦν κυβερνήτης οὐδὲ τῶν ἐμπλεόντων γνώριμος πολλοῖς; ἀπ᾽ ὀνόματος] Now extend the "body" of possession to the framework of consciousness required to work with a given entity. Call it the "spell." The boundaries of that spell define a class of spirit: you can call "lemures" or "gnomes" or whatever, players at a certain game that can fit into a particular classificatory box of the mind. Some spells contact a particular spirit on behalf of a personal relationship. In this case, you are at least on the brink of having a cult around that spirit. Give it a point of whatever it likes and seal the deal. You've got a personal gnome, a player at the game of earth who travels with you and fits into the doll you've made.
  5. While I would hate to contemplate "naturalistic" parallels within the Gloranthan corpus, I never really bought the story that trolls spent an eternity just happily breaking shit down in the lower depths until one bad day the sun brought them all boiling up to the surface. Our hypothetical archaic elves might tell another story of the days before they took death out for a spin. Trees there will beApples, fruits maybeYou know what I fear ~ the aphorisms of tight indigo trousers
  6. One of two things I love about this is the ways it reopens questions of who exactly is trapped under the Block. IMG these deep mysteries of the pharmakon and in particular the fermentation techniques that convert the disease into the cure (pharmentation, as it were) are one of those rare profound insights into mythic structure so dangerous that they were actually wiped out within human ken. Conventional sages who talk animatedly about the schools of illumination, blue moon divination, EWF and the secret of the God Learners clam up around the inner workings of Chalana Arroy and her dead boy. That's okay. Even conventional modern elves won't talk about it. That's okay too. We all need our privacies. Time in the sense of "becoming" (ereignis, speaking of the dank drippy places) is an interesting wrinkle here. Maybe the lunar elites, having finally wiped out their elves in the wild, ponder the fruits of time on their way to being squeezed for "redder wine," which we all know as the sloe gin fizz. But conventional sages don't really talk much about what the lunar elites really think about.
  7. The Earth King is the nitrogen fix. When Genert died, legumes (like clover) shifted to an annual seed-to-soil cycle that liberates for use by the grain goddesses. Within the Pamalt economy, most of the available circulates within the existing ground cover and except in slash-and-burn experiments is not available for other crops. We call this system embyli or "the yellow way."
  8. I think everything is good here. This thread is designed to sometimes function as a garbage dump and sometimes it becomes a more extended point-by-point workshop. Sometimes a grave, sometimes a garden. Some of these theories are ready for prime time and can support their own threads. But I'm not going to say which is which.
  9. I'm sure we've all met someone like that but I hear you, opening oneself up to the hate mail seems "a rather stupid kind of mischief." The fans like her. She's having a moment. I'm here to psychoanalyze her and not the fans. I don't have an extremely high tolerance for the Grateful Dead but love the "Mountains of the Moon" they did for Hugh Hefner though, which probably reveals something about me and a lunarized ulEria. Surely as the empire reaches like Winnicott's baby for the summits of negation (and the depths of creation) their magicians need to negotiate every wisp of the transcendent they can find, especially one they consider still present enough to have its own planet. White Moon, Red Moon, Blue Planet Woman? CA speaks for Harmony and Uleria speaks for Fertility. Vanished Dayzatar owns Truth. We have already mentioned the Evangelical cults with their ferocious devil-god who creates mankind for the pleasure of damning it and forcing it to crawl before him, while he yells with drunken glee over the agony of his only son. But in the same class, we must place Christian Science, so grotesquely afraid of pain, suffering and evil of every sort, that its dupes can think of nothing better than to bleat denials of its actuality, in the hope of hypnotizing themselves into anaesthesia.
  10. A while back people were looking for shamanic traditions that incorporated a "Bad Woman" and if I recall correctly our friend Mallia showed up as cosmic adversary for any shamanically oriented healers . . . maybe most goddesses have a bright side and a night side that cycle around them like shadows on a moon. We talk a lot about the night side goddesses who restrict their violence to men and not much about those who harbor special vindictiveness against other women. Real Talk: I think player sympathy tends to favor Uleria as a more of a victim goddess than an active witch cult . . . her enemies are portrayed as the repressed ones, Edward Woodward going crazy sweating in the room above the tavern as Britt Ekland's butt double bumps and slaps the wall between them. Hard to fight that intrinsic bias even if you wanted to. But as an alternative to the earth queens, where does Uleria come from? Was there an original center here as with GLORANTAY, some historical spike from which the ideas propagated, sticking in some places and getting washed away in others? How much does modern Uleria owe to the Pelandan goddess complex (which has lost or simply hidden its pregnancy magic, the pedant intones), and if so, which strands in particular? Which cultures embraced her from the dawn times onward and which ones shut the doors when they heard the temple bells? Who still loves free love and who thinks of witch stories? The moon is red but the blue planet is blue, talk about your madonna and your whore.
  11. I had a note for them but lost it in the erotocomatose hangover. Modern trolls do not have a native source of vanilla pregnancy magic or even a whole lot of Fertility . . . Korasting being broken to the point where she can only mitigate the enlo mutation, XU supporting the mommy-daddy-flipping couvade. (Cue the XU hermeneuticians or hermenXUticians.) Despite the all-mother mystique, KL no longer provides anything except, interestingly enough, cross-species adoption rites. But then again, I also liked the "nymph" origin story for Cragspider as an underpinning for her fixation on restoring troll fertility. The "nymphs" are tilntae, right? Not dryads. Not gnomes. And Asrelia, like osiris, is technically a black goddess according to Troll Gods, for what that's worth.
  12. This is a uh "fertile" insight validated by @hipsterinspace with the great observation that Uleria has no modern associates and no major modern cult has a special association with her. She is simultaneously ubiquitous ("everyone" is theoretically a lay member) and alone. Her spells are unique, not shared. Her initiation is, as you say, separate . . . "non reciprocal," although they welcome people who are already adult members of other cults. What's interesting for me in this revolves around who takes the double initiation and how separating the initiations works out in practice. Anyone can get married, have children and presumably engage in some form of Love without having any conscious contact with Uleria whatsoever. Ernalda or presumably (?) Dendara initiation is all it takes. Maybe this means that in some Gloranthas children conceived within wedlock sprout from cabbages or through whatever rococo process you care to postulate. Maybe it means these goddesses derive from Uleria (as old-school "high god") in some way and so "pass through" her sexual powers as part of their standard cult experience. And Uleria likewise has her own pregnancy magic that runs parallel to Ernalda's (and presumably Dendara's) spells but does not necessarily stack. It's a separate sacrifice, compatible with but not identical to the blessings the wife goddesses normally provide. Competitive. Because Ernalda and Dendara have Fertility, they can support their form of baby making. But because Uleria IS Fertility, I have a feeling the Uleria spells are the more universal or "natural." They may not be original but they came first. Rites of spring. Modern Uleria even has an entire aspect or methodology that revolves around motherhood. (As written, her reproductive magic is gendered.) Some of this magic resurfaces independently within Ernalda as the midwife subcult, but the spell unique to her alone allows initiates to move a fetus from womb to womb . . . which subverts the marital-maternal bond even in its altruistic applications. You can be a surrogate. Or if the other woman (see parenthesis above) wants or needs to remain chaste for some reason, you can be the one who conceives and then send the child over for something like a virginal or otherwise ritually pure birth. Suddenly there can be all kinds of babies happening outside the conventional "a mommy and a daddy love each other very much" framework . . . even before you start having oxytocin nightmares around witchcraft. But IMG this is the point of modern Uleria. Babies happen outside any wife goddess regime or "girlfriend experience." Motherhood does not belong to the marriage goddesses. Sometimes the roles intersect, sometimes they don't. And ultimately both Ernalda and Dendara will concede that just as they will never admit identity with each other, they are not identical with Uleria either. They may be three routes to similar magic but they are not interchangeable. (Sorry, @Eff I mysteriously do not rise to the bait although surely only one of the portals is "fertile.") All can be mothers. Uleria feels no need to be a wife except on the most transactional basis. This is my Kierkegaard joke: the roles are not transitive. Once you opt into an authentic marriage role, you are opting out of Uleria. She needs to initiate elsewhere to buy into the husband-protector complex. Last I looked, Eiritha and the Grain Goddesses (including modern Pela and Oria) don't get pregnancy spells, by the way. Motherhood is not part of their portfolio and is not even granted through association. You need to initiate elsewhere to get those spells. Maybe they had those spells once but not now. Likewise, Ernalda (and undoubtedly Dendara) regulate love: if you aren't at least a lay member of an earth queen cult, you cannot procreate without angering the earth forces. Fertility doesn't care. Earth is the jealous goddess. IMG the Earth cults are expanding at the expense of more archaic and local Fertility forms. The implications for a gloranthan feminism are interesting as Raw Fertility and the theoretical primal goddess religion recede in the face of more or less heteronormative condominiums, theogamies. Sure, he said, staring at the Marija Gimbutas up on the shelf. That's how it goes. The undifferentiated and polymorphous libido of the Uleria force, her very "perversity," ends up repressed in a world of stable relationships. But everything repressed can return. And as one or more of the wives rise toward achieving transcendental status, they may find themselves converging with the most archaic of the forms once more. The feminine consciousness expands in as many directions as exist and maybe some that don't yet. Who is missing from these equations? A white goddess who is a mother and never a wife. A red goddess who does what she wants, wife or girlfriend or mother or daughter depending on the way the light falls in that moment. An old goddess who fell in love with a wild boy once and broke the world. (Some say she was a former wife and mother who followed her own bliss and became an uleria, devil be damned.) Various "perpetual virgins," real and euphemistic. And that's just off the top of my head, you can undoubtedly name others. Whatever's going on with Entekos. Scary monsters.
  13. It is quite the flex yes. I suspect the "neutral" rating from the trad solar establishment is more about unspeakableness than a simple shrug. She is literally unfit for ink. But that said, inner Dendara (as she is experienced by initiates, i.e., "women") is not exactly a trad solar establishment figure. I was talking about reciprocal initiation originally . . . whether the Uleria rites directly translate to Ernalda / Dendara mysteries or why not. Is she a separate entity or simply singing their songs in a different octave, as it were. This is not a trivial question because she . . . and not Ernalda, much less Dendara . . . owns and so answering the question might reveal something important about that rune in the world right now. The compatibilities are interesting but obviously two gods can be extremely compatible without sharing an initiation or a cult.
  14. People have done it. I have an old friend with what's turned into inoperable but relatively stable brain cancer. Until they find a cocktail that can target it, we're stuck with figuring out how to keep it calm. Other friends have decided to engage in similar negotiations with prostate. You might not "want" to accommodate it, but that's what happens. Campbell was not an oncologist but he managed to die of it . . . and flips this very same metaphor around 27:00-29:00 to beg the question of whether the tumor should try to accommodate the host, growing slowly for example to get more life. This is central to my evolving view of esoteric CA as distinct from esoteric Uleria. If we are to have plural great goddesses then let them be more than masks for one another. This RETVRN aspect of in the Greg discussion is truly chilling. Campbell notes that every generation is a kind of "problem" for the ones that come before and after . . . the spirit of every age is a disease spirit. But it is also a cure for a different disease, much like language is the cure and cause of forgetting and, again, in Müller, mythology itself is the productive disease or parasite on language. On the other tentacle, the nysalorites had their talking healers too.
  15. I owe more spider talk that might even open up a sense of the troll gods but in practice looks more like . . . thinking about and here though, an old Joseph Campbell lecture is playing in the office today and he just touched on the tension between world negating mythologies in which life is a disease (mythology is a disease of language, mind is a disease of semen) and the world affirming mythologies in which life can be cured or at least treated. Chalana Arroy.
  16. As we know rotated 90 degrees is but put a stake through it and you get . . . "hunger," sometimes "bat." A lot of great things on this thread but I want to tease out a bit more here. Where is Chalana Arroy, enemy / sister of Mallia from the other angle? After all, the other uleria thread reveals that is also the intersection of opposites, ascending and descending or 🔯 . . . whereas CA is identified in certain archaic sources with a single negative "mountain" () that descends into absence instead of rising, a mystic hole in the ground. What does she refuse that her sisters embraced? But as Greg insisted is infertile, which makes JarEel's superheroic mission interesting.
  17. I don't know how far back the historical record on the jajagappa cult goes but yes, it would be interesting to posit a primeval "dog belt" that goes through cycles of consolidation (Wolf Empire) and fragmentation. They apparently found ways through the mountains so their cultural exchange didn't necessarily need to stop in the usual places. One question then might be how Jannisor's god differentiated as the wolves rose and fell . . . and what remains after centuries of lunar intervention. Looking more carefully at the house of Sartar suggests a loophole in the taboo against love with non-shapeshifters; Change itself being a way (like Harmony) to transcend the taint and in the fullness of Time probably others we haven't learned much about yet.
  18. One uh "riddle" this poses is how such a gf/bf experience maps across competing ernalda/dendara forms of marriage. We know ernalda and dendara initiations are aggressively non-reciprocal but can a sufficiently advanced uleria initiate worship freely in both temples and others besides? Kierkegaard, perhaps perversely, insists that the answer is no. But there are some mighty advanced ulerians out there.
  19. There are at least 60 of them circulating around the world and in theory at least a dozen more in reserve if the original kickstarter backer limits reflect the print run. Most of them will hit the secondary market eventually so the patient, alert, cunning and long-lived will get several chances over the next decade. If someone reading this has a deep urge to buy in retroactively in the meantime I suggest reaching out to Rick nicely to see what he can do for you and what terms he feels are fair. The gods often smile on the truly motivated seeker. They're pretty nice.
  20. Downright redemptive to say "MALKYN" here instead of this person you refer to as "Orlanth." Of course He was not a god but only the last of the line of storm gods, simultaneously fulfilling all old storm cult covenants and rendering them obsolete.
  21. While it risks making myself especially obnoxious this parallel is striking enough that comment is required. In a pluralist fandom, some suns (or gloranthas) are often bigger than others . . . accidentally or not, they eclipse their peers to the point where they can't be distinguished with the naked eye or even spells that are no longer actively supported in the rules. It's nice to think that the smaller sun merges into the aggregate in some way so whatever aspects of experience made it unique survive the cycle but sometimes I'm sure Kargzant simply gets bridled. The conventions of game publishing complicate this process by establishing at the start which sun will be the big one and which villages get shine while others remain bare sketch. The details still reflect the path of that big sun (corporate attention, "development," canon) but in practice as you point out deviation is actually more the rule. Everybody's glorantha must vary to fit the arc of the game you're playing, whatever that game is. We out here outside the big sun have our own tale to tell. We have our fights and our friendships, shifting angles in the fan sky to fit our orbits. The big sun, meanwhile, is not as stable as it looks. "The personnel changes." Even the names listed in the Birth of Elmal reflect a story of punctuated disintegration as little suns get caught in the big gravity well for awhile and then slingshot out. This is still a young world. There haven't been many big suns. When we stick around, we see whether and how the big suns learn. I like to think it ultimately gets better, but remember, I for one come to glorantha for narrative experiences that are sometimes lacking here at home. This is a kind of "fantasy" setting. It is possible but far from easy to incorporate all known and unknown canon as well as enough of the mechanisms through which fresh canon is generated. In my experience such a person can only be pleasantly surprised when the sun deviates from its anticipated course: the new trajectory still fits what is known and what is possible, but expresses all of this in a fashion that delights. For me this means generating additional possibilities, enlarging the range of what's possible by opening more doors than it shuts. In theory, any little glorantha in isolation can drift its way into becoming a big enough sun, a big glorantha in its own right. It can also burn out. That's life. Some of these entities may no longer be gloranthas at all when it's all said and done. That's fine. Leave the sunning to the sun, we have better things to see. The current and historical suns, for example, haven't really gotten to Wenelia yet, except in glimpses from afar when they're distracted. What evolved out there? Obviously they didn't have or need a Monrogh or a shadowy puppetmaster nudging Monrogh out of the way. But they have the Caladran pantheon nearby and probably an archival vestige of all the little light cults the God Learners cared to stockpile there when they found them in their journeying. Little suns from Teshnos, little suns from Ralios, little suns from everywhere too small to show up in the top-level surveys. I don't think they ever really had Hill of Gold. They probably looked toward parallel ordeals and other sacred sites, looking west originally and then toward the volcano center. Horse purity on their side of the great rivalry, rain purity on the other. This was probably the dominant form of little sun husband protector in Esrolia until relatively recently. We just don't know much about it yet because the big sun has yet to shine directly on it. That's a comfort and an opportunity for little suns to pursue.
  22. Really reading "How I Screwed Up Your Glorantha" again after a few years of only occasional surface review, it's interesting how the author (possibly only sometimes Greg and sometimes an unnamed visionary of Tarkalor's court) both hedges his answer to this question and blurs our received understanding of what exactly was going on behind the "Monrogh" revelations. As we know from the last weird pages of HHP, the people who inherit from Monrogh make significant effort to mediate their sympathy for Nysalor with a sensible loathing for the other entity, the one who did all the actual bad things, someone they call Gbaji. It's quite the flex when the Birth of Elmal literally has Arkat scribbled all over it . . . but then again, the author of that document is not Monro(gh) and doesn't actually endorse the Yelmalio interpretation of Multiple Suns. The important thing for this person is that Multiple Suns got Monro to shut the hell up, go over there to stop complicating the situation and even help wipe out lingering troll influences in the face of disorienting lunar insights from the north. The author's troll background is equally interesting but it is the author's nature to betray. The important thing is that we can give this person what they say they always wanted and meet them face to face as co creators. The alternative is to be loved to death. The author, for example, favored Orlanth. But it can be a big tribe.
  23. "War is the creator of all great things," Campbell says, quoting Heraclitus. "It is through tension that the new thing comes forth. It's a very complicated problem. . . . you've heard, love your neighbor and hate your enemy. This doesn't mean you shouldn't have enemies. He says you should love your enemy." That's a loophole for CA. CA can love her enemies without offering them comfort or aid. I think modern Yelmalio can accept the mothers and most of them think the mothers are the whole of the way. They can even hire themselves out in the mothers' wars. But when they discover the inner dynamics, they recoil. That's not what their identity is wrapped around. They can let that identity go and become something else. Or they can cling to that identity and see the goddess as an enemy . . . and their golden rule is different from ours.
  24. Fortuitously we were just playing an old Joseph Campbell lecture where he defines the vaishyas as "people of property" so here we are. From one point of view, identity, like property, is the foundation of liberty. From another, it's the eradication of property, the erosion of identity, that liberates. It's all in what one person is rebelling against and what the other has got. Satan, after all, is himself a famous liberator as well as a theologian. IMG the inner cult of the goddess is profoundly antinomian and apocalyptic. Much like Jean Grey unbound, she is concerned with testing all propositions by setting them on fire. The truth will endure. Everything else will burn away. (Campbell talking about "prairie fire" now.) Transformed. Given a fresh start. This is not in the service of the perpetuation of the world. There are of course, as you know, tricks of perspective here too . . . what the world means, what the self means, how they relate and ultimately which girl's mother will be bigger than other girls' (seven) mothers. People wrapped around the perpetuation of the world react with horror, outrage, disbelief. Modern CA, for example, is all about perpetuation to the point to which she will overlook just about everything but a direct assault on the systems that keep the world alive. We out here might concede that said systems include bestial acts but admitting this is alien to the CA sense of mission . . . the CA "identity." It requires what we gamers call an illumination. And by that point it's too late. (Campbell just asks how you know your identity.) You're liberated from the compatibility table, you can associate with certain people to get ideas from them. (Direct Campbell quote.) Arguably the compatibility table is the compromise as currently constructed. That can change. We've seen it.
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