Eff

I would go in a different direction. A buddha is not automatically a god (neither a deva or an asura) and is most likely to be a human, but within Buddhism, the knowledge of the Shakyamuni Buddha transcends that of Brahma the ruler of the devas. The applicability to Sedenya and Nysalor seems fairly relevant. Of course, some gods are also buddhas, and some buddhas wear the masks of gods in order to spread the dharma more expeditiously. The categories are not a pyramid, nor a ziggurat.

Well, many gods also have physical presences in the world, being present in the water of a river or the stone of a mountain or in every lamb frolicking in a field.

I am not so sure that this makes sense, logically. I don't believe that Glorantha has a meaningful hierarchy where all gods are above all non-gods.

Are those the only two options that exist? God or "random schmuck"?

Was Nysalor a god?

Referring to him being described as a pupil of Zzabur in the Guide. Hypothetically possible in the right Gloranthas, but suggestive.

An alternative way of looking at it: 1. zaburs: Energy workers. 2. dronars: Matter workers. 3. gwymirs: Obsoleted. 3a. horals: Matter-to-Energy workers 4. talars: Mediators. 5. vadelas: [REDACTED] workers. 5a. hykims: [REDACTED] workers. 5b. seshnas: [REDACTED] [REDACTED] workers. 5c. Pending. 6. menenas: Talent Recruitment and Development. There is definitely a space 7, and maybe an 8.

This does seem to scan with God Forgot and Malaskan Philippe's apparent caste-hopping.

I would love to see disease as a concept fall down some stairs. Does she have a sister? Is that sister into that kind of stuff too? What's her sister's number?

I want to know more about Yena Wambla now.

The Newtling Renegades first appeared in Nomad Gods (1977), and Wyrms Footnotes #4 (1978), if I recall correctly, describes them in more detail.

I can swallow Kajabor. Feel free to ask me how.

I had underestimated the degree of work I'd already been doing with the unicorn king. Though in another guise. Tricky how many of those Ralzakark has!

Poor creature! Someone should invent stamps for him to collect.

What else do I know that was made by an Unholy Trio in a sort of Doom Conjunction, which unleashed all manner of possibilities and changes upon the previous static and perfect eternal world, which existed isolated from any external influence? Which encouraged the young and the old alike to take the raw power of Creation into their hands, heedless of what they might make? Which is of uncertain numbering, of internal contradictions and incoherence? Which is blocked off by masks of its more tractable successors? I have seen the face of the Devil, and it is a woman with red hair and a rock lizard dueling. Crushed beneath a block of Law by a bull.

A mystic sought the Red Moon, and climbed to the top from the bottom, seeking audience with the Great Sedenya. When he got there, he asked the Transcendent One, "Why didn't you take the Young Elementals and make your own world? Why remain in this one?" The Goddess looked at him with four of her faces. The first said, "All of my records are here," and winked. The second said "Puppet shows are no good without someone watching." The third said, "I'm not clever enough to invent another Etyries, or Valare, or Eserela, or- well, anyways, if I want to ride that train, I have to pay for a ticket." The fourth said "Didn't I?" and laughed. When the mystic woke, he was afflicted with the most horrible delusion, insisting that the world was called "Glorontha" and this one had been edited.

The taste of the apple, or was it a pomegranate? But of course, there's the big block in the way. Storm Bull put it there. "Couldn't be me!" Acknowledging knowledge means at some point acknowledging capacity, potentiality, culpability. It takes four arms or more to realize that the mask you're facing may be your own. Much simpler to attribute matters to the headache. (And what does Ralzakark want? More Oddis?)

The hummingbird is a symbol of ferocity and rebirth in Mexican contexts, which Stafford had recently had a transformative experience with. The faithful seeing a hummingbird is a symbol for them seeing the rebirth of Teelo Estara as Teelo Imara, the fierce protector goddess rising into the sky and swooping down on their oppressors. But the unfaithful see only death, Maha Quata. What would it say that people see a bat today? That requires thinking symbolically.

I mean, the line in Heroquest: Glorantha is very plainly and unsubtly about calling the Red Goddess the devil. Any reading which offers any degree of redemptive potential is directly contrary to the intent and thus is resistive in some fashion.

Looking at the real world for a bit- (always a dangerous thing with Glorantha) shamanic religious practices that I am personally familiar with tend to rely on who or what you know, spiritually. An oungan or manbo must know the proper veve to call a particular lwa for a ceremony and invite them into a participant's body. A miko can be expected to deal with a kami that's enshrined in the jinja she works at, and familiar gods and spirits, but an unusual or foreign one requires some preparation and careful ritual work to understand them. But foreign kami and previously unknown lwa (perhaps most notoriously, Mademoiselle Charlotte) still find their way in regardless, and so the practitioners have to be able to learn their ways and record their veves, subject to the willingness of the god to be part of the system. If the god isn't willing to play ball (Mademoiselle Charlotte can be summoned, but she only helps people she takes a fancy to), there's not much you can do. Try again next year.

Did they? I thought they sentenced him to hard labor for life with a veneer of mystical teaching to assuage any guilt at the sheer disproportionality of their actions. Strange how the mind wanders.

A punter asked Great Sister one day, "How can one achieve liberation from the world and still live within it? Do not the Sevened still eat and drink and breathe, such that Oria and Oslira and still hold them in subjugation, chains wrapped around their necks, strangling them should they ever attempt to act on their liberation? How can anyone be liberated without total annihilation, of themselves or of the gods?" Great Sister asked, "When my mother proclaimed the First Manumission, did those who were freed by it burn down all of Torang, slaying the people who had traded in human flesh?" The punter said, "Stick to the point," and then he saw Great Sister's face, and then he mumbled, "No." "And yet they were free to do so! They had been fully armed and regimented, brigaded and accompanied, and yet they decided that, though it was in their power to kill and burn, they would choose not to do so generally, and so it was only the grandees who were flogged to death with their own whips. So, too, does the decision to eat and drink and maintain the functions of the body say nothing about whether the spirit is free to leave it or not by itself." Great Sister folded her arms. "Any more questions?" she asked.

In good ol' RQ2, any time a shaman went looking for spirits, there was a 1% chance they would encounter a deity on the Spirit Contact table, with "Deity" POW and "Unlimited" INT, and the notes indicate that deities normally ignore spirits unless they "actively intrude on their sphere of activity". Now, the shaman obviously couldn't make such a deity a controlled spirit, without at least "Deity" POW of their own, 1 POW left over for their body, and 1 POW in the spirit world. But the deity could potentially reverse the equation, offering POW for service in the same way shamans do to spirits and with similar termination conditions on the contract. Within RQ2, this would come down to the referee's decision about what the deity thinks of shamans, of course. But it seems to me very relevant to the Arcane Lore thoughts on "integration" and "rejection".

Of course, wootz steel requires the crucible be cracked to extract the smelted metal. There is a well-understood way in which a good solid shattering is essential to further creation. Even if we have foundries now. They don't have many broos Oop North, where we find the Steel Sword Legion and the Third Eye Blue, who stole the secret of iron, now do they? Dorastor*, sure, but north of Old Wolf Fort? The witch hat may be passed off to other figures elsewhere, the flayed woman Thed haunting Prax, the Waste(s) Land(s), and maybe the people around Heort's country. But elsewhere, perhaps, there's a woman with a goat's skin for a mantle, or maybe a hat, vaping on the balcony at all the best psychic flashes of divine parties. *Of course, when I went there, Ralzakark was a Hellwood or possibly Poisonwood elf with a unicorn horn tied on with a headband.

Without any direct insight, I think that there are several major factors at work in that association. One of them is that content-wise, Ragnaglar has never had a cult, but anyone rolling up broo for their latest expedition into the Big Rubble or fending off Muriah's revenge will see that Thed cult and the Curse of Thed table. So there's a definite priming there of "broos usually have goat heads, Thed is the broo goddess," to produce Thed the Nannygoat Goddess. But the other side of it, well, that's where we start getting into the game of blaming the victim. Which isn't hard to see in the textual Thed cult of Cults of Terror (1981) - female broo are supposedly extremely rare, tormented by Thed, and so on. The broo are not responsible for Ragnaglar's deeds, but Thed takes it out on them regardless. (But in Borderlands (1982), Muriah's broo are not all that much like the Thed cult- they have a 50/50 gender ratio of male and female, or close to it, and relationships close enough to love the text uses the word "lover". This renders it an unspeakably Chaotic text before we get into its depiction of Lunar attitudes in Prax!) And then we ordinary players, now, we also blame the victim, the survivor, the one who's still around and bleeding on us. And so, the evil goats of Ragnaglar get transferred onto Thed. The randy billygoat symbology of Ragnaglar the Primordial Rapist, Eurmal the Horny Trickster, (and Gerendetho, Lodril's son) is lost, and instead we have the nympho goat slut Thed. Some truly wretched text has fallen out of this understanding in its fullest form, of course. But what can we see by setting the wretched stuff in a corner? Not all that much! She's still Chaotic, and therefore still "evil-adjacent". She still has that spaded devil tail in William Church's counter art. Who could possibly look at her and see someone worthy of compassion? To stretch their empathy out and say, "This was wrong, to summon the Devil was wrong, but what happened to you was wrong too"? To reject the dualistic opposition, the absolutes pointed directly at each other? Certainly not those Chaos-hating Praxians who... are fully capable of allying Thed in that old board game from the year Star Wars came out. Maybe they're just "making use" of her. Maybe we could stop and think about that phrasing. But maybe there's something different going on.