Eff

I kind of assumed that since hazia is described as a classical hallucinogenic/euphoric in effects and not as a dissociative/depressant hallucinogen, that it was cannabis or Fantasy Cannabis Equivalent. Of course, maybe it's not worth digging too deeply into narcotics in Glorantha given "black lotus dust".

I apologize for the length of this reply in advance. It's hard to take this post seriously at all. "Chaos is definitely objectively the death of the world, or else Gloranthans would revere Wakboth as a great liberator" is quite simply devoid of logic. Wakboth is not Chaos as a whole. The objective truth of what Chaos is does not mean that Gloranthans have that same perspective on Chaos. And, though this is tiny compared to the yawning gaps elsewhere, even if Wakboth is Chaos as a whole (which I must emphasize is fairly obviously and overtly false within every source we have on Chaos) then even if Chaos is essential for the functioning of Glorantha, that doesn't mean that Wakboth would therefore be a "great liberator". Indeed, if Chaos were objectively the death of the world, then it would make more sense to worship Wakboth as a great liberator, as liberating souls from the gross matter they have been captured in, in a kind of cod-Gnosticism. And this doesn't get any better as we move on. "Glorantha existed perfectly happily before Chaos". False. Predark, which is very obviously Chaos, predates the Darkness, the origin of Gloranthan existence. Predark is fought by the gods in the story of Umath and Harana Ilor. Predark is fought by the gods, according to this story, with a weapon they call "Creation". Let's leave that aside for a moment. The Uz fought Chaos during the Golden Age, when Yelm ruled the skies. Chaos and Chaos monsters are a factor in Six Ages: Ride like the Wind, which clearly predates the Great Darkness. All of this is without going to the fairly standard explanation of the setting and the note that the Chaosium pours raw Chaos into Glorantha but this Chaos is absolutely necessary to keep Glorantha moving, as without it Glorantha would be kept in a permanent stasis. And that no sane Gloranthan understands this. Which makes it a very etic perspective, to go with the emic perspectives which contradict your interpretation. And all of this is without considering whether Time is in fact a good thing. Certainly, I would rather live in the mythic now than in the Green Age, since I generally enjoy individual consciousness and the existence of other beings. Certainly, at least, endless Creation without Entropy would turn Glorantha into an endlessly expanding malignant brain tumor, a cancer cell of a universe, devoid of anything we can relate to as human beings. But, again, "Illuminate propaganda" has me wondering if this is performance art. Well, I was referring obliquely to being a polyamorous transgender lesbian. Because the broader point there is that cults in Glorantha are not like (most) modern religions where you can join or leave freely, they're expressions of particular roles within society. You don't become an initiate of Issaries just for kicks, you do it because you are drawn into the roles that Issaries represents in your culture, or in a culture that you're joining. And in Orlanthi cultures, you can't just say, "No, I refuse to become an adult". And so, in the metaphor I am using, I was raised in the United States of America and initiated in a variety of American "cults" that had cultic strictures- I was to be a heterosexual man, I was to engage in heterosexual sexual intercourse, I was to express romantic devotion to only one woman. And if I was to deviate from these strictures, then a frightful array of "spirits of reprisal", that is to say entities which operate independently of social sanction, would descend upon me and tear me apart. They serried in ranks, moved to bar my way through the world at every turn, and because I could not fulfill the cultic strictures, I was tormented by them again and again. And then I was Illuminated. It was, in its own way, the Illumination of the Red Moon, in that I resolved that if I was going to be tormented by these "spirits of reprisal" anyways, I wouldn't let my fear hold me back from embracing what I felt and knew. And then when I was Illuminated, that is, when I had accepted that I was a trans woman and not a man, that I was a lesbian and not anything else, that I was polyamorous, the spirits of reprisal could no longer touch me. (As a side personal note, I was already exploring Glorantha before this, but it was at about this point that I began to favor the Lunars most heavily.) But of course, as an Illuminate in a world where there is no Lunar Way, no Humakti, no Waltzing and Hunting Bands, there is then the difficulty of constructing what exactly the spiritual universe is, having left behind one's previous one as unsuitable. Which is in fact a substantial matter for, in the real world, lesbians (and queer people more broadly) and trans women (and transgender people more broadly) and polyamorous people. I want to make it clear that this is all a metaphor. There isn't a gribbly creature with big sharp fangs called Lesbian Bed Death that comes to torment women exploring their sexuality. However, the metaphor is one that I find very valuable to use to think about culturally-bound beliefs and practices that are genuinely hurtful to the subaltern, and the terrible freedom that is imposed by breaking free of said beliefs and practices, and the necessity of constructing one's own beliefs and practices in conjunction with others, so as to avoid Occlusion. Which in this metaphor, is the perpetuation of hurtful behaviors. This lengthy personal story is here specifically to explain that metaphor in excruciating detail and thus to clarify some of what I meant by Glorantha being softer than the real world. In that Glorantha is, specifically according to Greg Stafford himself, better to live in for LGBTQ people in any culture in the setting than anywhere in the modern day. So in a very real sense, Glorantha is softer than the modern day, let alone history, in this very specific area. So probably nobody in the setting actually has to ever go through the torments I went through, or anything even particularly like them. Which is a good thing. And so I take exception with your view that "failing to meet your obligations is also a moral failing unless they are very unjust duties indeed". I would not say (in a serious context, jokes are another matter) that being a man is an unjust duty, or that heterosexuality is an unjust duty, or that monamory is an unjust duty. Let alone a very unjust duty, for any of them. I would say that they are unjust things to impose on people regardless of their consent. But that, oops, brings us to the freedom of Illumination and the ability to move between identities and cast off one's skin in a very slippery fashion indeed. The Red Moon turns back to full. It matters on a profound personal level. It doesn't matter in terms of munchkinry. Someone who is cosmopolitan in attitudes and behavior is not more powerful than someone who is provincial, except in such power as comes from having a broader perspective to draw upon. You cannot realistically be a traveler who moves between Rathorela and Vormain in a single year and hold down any occupation that isn't "being Richie Rich". That's one of the jokes on that list, along with including a god who's only worshiped by furtive cults or in inaccessible places. And even if you are a traveler in realistic terms, you're still going to have to have a massive cash reserve to fund cultic obligations in order to participate in worship at anything beyond the most basic level. Let alone trying to become a priest of multiple gods that are not shared within a particular culture. Now, I don't think any game rules reflect this, but it's said in several sources that it takes 198 people to successfully perform a worship ritual that restores magic and allows contact with one's god. Can you do it with fewer, or with one person? Perhaps, but presumably not predictably or regularly. You might not even be able to restore what RQ calls Rune Magic with this! It may just allow you to restore more exotic magical abilities that reflect personal and individual contemplation. We don't know, and we certainly can't make any definite claims about how realistic it is to be a Esvulari and maintain your Sedenya and Uncol and Triolina and Pamalt mini temples so you can charge up on their magic every season. But in the end, "we don't want a world full of these sort of absurd God Learners" is an asinine statement. What stops people from all becoming cosmopolitan Illuminates? The fact that the vast majority of them will never go any further than the nearest market or local center of religious pilgrimage! The kind of cosmopolitan exploration of the universe via moving between cultures is something that only player characters and other extraordinary individuals can really do. (Note that, in turn, the EWF's decline from Right Action is linked to them moving away from draconic mysticism entered into voluntarily and towards draconic mysticism forcibly incorporated into...) "You can play an illuminated (sic) Storm Bull/Uroxi who has chaos features, and nobody could detect the chaos features." Storm Bullies are dumb, but they're not so dumb that when they look at skin turning into acidic slime they'd say, "Wow, new skincare?" But what you're offering up here is fundamentally an asinine proposal. Why not join Primal Chaos as a Storm Bully? Why would someone who thinks that's a credible option remain a follower of Storm Bull after Illumination? You're saying, "What if a player character decides to try and do these supposedly abusive things," in essence. And that's not a problem that is solvable by removing Illumination as an option, because the problem is not that the option exists as such. The problem isn't even that the player wants to pursue this for their character! The problem is that there's clearly some mismatch between what that player and other players want to play, which is something that would manifest in other fashions no matter how you adjusted the rules. And if the players all agree that one character deciding to become some kind of transhumanist abomination is something that they're willing to play with, then what's wrong with letting that happen, exactly? (This is not to say that game balance is irrelevant, but that game balance is an issue when choices are presented in a way such that people can inadvertently break the balance of gameplay, and indeed when they regularly do so. This is not true for Illumination in Gloranthan gaming and it's also not true for Chaos worship. It's also not really possible within the rules as written to choose which Chaos features you get, in any case, so even if you do try and pursue your stoorworm transformation fantasy the rules as written mean you likely dissolve into gorp before you get too far.) But there's no evidence to suggest that Arkat ever actually mixed magic in this sense personally. The Arkat Kingtroll cult teaches sorcery to Uz, so we might say that Arkat kept using sorcery. (Of course, that's no different from being a Lhankor Mhy initiate in the core rules.) But the sources about Arkat indicate that when he moved between cultures, he stopped using most of the magic of the culture he had abandoned. When he achieved the Joy of the Heart, he was no longer described as using Brithini magic. When he initiated to Humakt and Orlanth, he is not described as combining Seshnegi sorcery with Sever Spirits and Thunderbolts. He then moved to becoming an Uz specifically to learn the secrets the Uz have for fighting Chaos... but after that point he's described as being a Zorak Zorani with a big burning third eye on his forehead. And after his wrestling match with Nysalor, he no longer behaves like an Uz. There's a consistent pattern here. And Arkat is described as using his experimental Heroquesting to seek out knowledge. So I think my description actually holds very well comparatively- power doesn't come from jacking your stats up to absurd levels and stacking magic spells atop one another, power comes from knowing things. "Who cares about the intricacies of your worldview when you can basically slaughter the Crimson Bat in a combat round with a 1600 point head critical that will go off unless you roll 00?" Well, for one thing, this character couldn't exist in RAW RQ:G. For a second thing, I would say that probably everyone you met who know who you were would care a whole lot about the intricacies of your worldview. It might well save a life! Or a few hundred! You're making an argument that extremely powerful characters are inappropriate for Gloranthan play, but... Jar-eel exists. Tada is waiting to be reassembled. Androgeus wanders the roads of the world. Harrek growls and snorts and gives orders aboard his pirate ship. Absurdly powerful characters already exist. They're part of the setting. The question is whether the people playing there decide, "We want to explore transhumanist power fantasies". Illumination specifically doesn't make it easier. Focusing on internal cultural views solely within the boundaries of the rules (unless the Illumination rules for RQ:RiG actually do allow you to do silly things like add free POW every season) will produce a more powerful character stats-wise. It's only outside the formal mathematical rules, where things are negotiated between the players and the books together, where Illumination can make "munchkining" so much easier. And at that point you're deep within Glorantha.

Everybody says Argrath killed Sedenya, but nobody says Argrath killed Orlanth, despite both of them having similar amounts of on-screen evidence in King of Sartar. Of course, the former is part of the surface point of the Argrathsaga, so the end of the Saga features a little note: "So they say! But it's still here! And now it's invisible instead!" And the latter, in "Argrath and the Devil", is a counterpoint that complicates Argrath and especially the process of historicizing Argrath's actions. So it needs no additional writing to complicate itself.

I wrote a little mini-essay outlining my elaboration of how Orlanthi societies fight based on the Hero Wars material as part of a somewhat longer piece comparing Kallyr and Argrath. I think it'd be hard to get too deep into anything beyond the Lunars/Sartarites/Praxians triangle with supplemental Kethaelan visions without getting extremely inventive wrt to Malkioni, Teshnans, Kralorela, etc.

20th century rules of war aren't genteel by historical standards, and rules of war are downright ancient. The basic five principles of modern laws of war- military necessity, distinction, proportionality, humanity, and honor- can all be recognized in war codes from antiquity (the Deuteronomic Code, the Mahabharata) and late antiquity (Abu Bakr's orders to his troops). Most importantly, they're not fighting a "war of mutual extermination", and I am literally unable to understand how this is a reading that can be derived from any of the sources. The only way you can presume this is a war of mutual extermination is to presume not just some things about the Lunar Empire that are difficult to justify in light of the sources, but also presume other things about Argrath that are also even less justifiable in terms of the sources (and totally elide Argrath's alliances with the Fazzurite faction in Tarsh, too) and then extend these justifications out universally in a way that ultimately renders every single entity in Glorantha totally incoherent in their vision of the universe. After all, if the Mostali are repairing the World Machine in order to exterminate every other thinking being in Glorantha, we must question why they accept the existence of Uz and Aldryami at all and presume that they are normal functions of the universe that have gone awry rather than thinking of them as Chaotic infiltrators attempting to sabotage the World Machine by any means necessary. Ideology shifts to justify actions, and if Gloranthan societies really were preparing to commit genocides in the lead-up to the Hero Wars, we would see that manifesting in the ideology on display. And we do not. And then to add onto all of this, the historical inspirations for Gloranthan cultures exaggerated massively in their historical records of events when it came to scale. Absolutely no credible historian of antiquity believes that the Persian army at Gaugamela really had between 250,000 and 1,000,000 soldiers on the battlefield, as the ancient sources about the battle claim. So when a Gloranthan document makes a similar grandiose claim about numbers or about scope, we should probably be extremely cautious about treating it as a factual statement. (Especially when it's a statement about events on the Other Side which are specifically called out as being beyond the ability of any participant to view objectively!)

Is this a bit?

But Chaos isn't the death of the world. Absence of Chaos in Glorantha would mean its death. So at a basic, fundamental level, that spiritual message carries an important truth about the universe. Is that truth dangerous? The theory of special relativity is dangerous, too. Comparative mythology is extremely dangerous. That doesn't make them any less true or meaningful, it just assigns a moral responsibility to not be Occluded. That being said, though, speaking as someone who would probably be Illuminated in Gloranthan terms, in that I have "dodged cult strictures", as it were, in at least three times over, without suffering from "spirits of reprisal"/ the supposed inherent consequences for dodging said strictures, not all cultural responsibilities are created equal. Some of them are genuinely oppressive! Now, Glorantha is nicer than the real world, in that two of those specific strictures canonically do not exist anywhere in it, and the third one is probably somewhat local. But that doesn't mean that there aren't strictures which bind people unjustly amid the ones that are morally important. So, you know, "dodging your responsibilities" can be a moral decision, and more importantly, the construction of an awareness of what is Truth and what is Illusion, that is to say, what applies universally/objectively and what applies particularly/subjectively is itself intrinsically spiritual. Being able to join any cult doesn't really mean much. You still need to make sacrifices and attend worship to regain your magic. You still need to engage with the cult in order to do that, too. Someone who's initiated to Orlanth and Sedenya and Jolaty and Rathor and Waha and Pamalt and Wachaza and Octamo is not going to be able to maintain a normal life, and they'll need to be fantastically wealthy and have a constant source of incoming wealth that they don't have to work to gain, or else be a fantabulously temporally powerful figure, in order to actually use all that delicious, delicious Rune magic, (and let's not even contemplate how much time it takes them to build their personal mojo up to get all those spells and have them actually be usable) and then have it be replenishable, rather than a single-use trick they can pull out for a single moment and then have to spend potentially a year or more working to regain. Or, to put it another way, an Illuminate that tries to do cult-shopping for power is extremely likely to have such little MP, in RQ terms, that they can fire off one or two exotic spells and then they fall over asleep. And if we assume that RQ kind of generally represents aspects of Gloranthan reality, then that reflects something about whether Illumination is actually the expressway to direct power. Now, joining cults to gain their secret knowledge of the world and expand your worldview without then maintaining those associations indefinitely, that's something that's much more practical, and is essentially exactly what Arkat did... but it's also not something in the rules for any Gloranthan game. You can't really call it "munchkining" because it exists in a space where it's not definable in rules terms and its relation to fantastic sources of power is left inarticulate, allowing the people playing in Glorantha to decide what it means for themselves. Which is only right and proper. Or, to put it another way, the amount of effort I put into playing an Illuminated character and having them quest for power by uncovering occult knowledge and chaining it together, if it was put into someone behaving according to socially conventional ways, would almost certainly produce someone far more directly powerful in every dimension. Weird, mystical behavior allows you to be a weird mystic... but Alakoring slew the Diamond Storm Dragon anyways.

Seeking spiritual enlightenment and understanding it requires a broader, more universal perspective is, I would suggest, not really equivalent to jokes about squads of God Learning wizards trying to storm Orlanth's Hall by weight of numbers in order to steal his magic weapons. It's also not really "gaming the rules" to realize that the rules are invalid, or that they are a relative stricture rather than an absolute one. Unless we're defining "reading the rulebook" as "munchkining", to continue the gaming analogy.

It's possible that the inability of broo to become impregnated or carry a child to term operates as a kind of spirit of reprisal attacking them for breaking Thed's strictures, and since Ralzakark is probably Illuminated in some fashion...

"Eucatastrophe" most formally refers to a sudden event, one that is predictable in hindsight but often not in foresight. As such, the most likely candidate for an unexpected save at the eleventh hour is simple- a reassembled Empire of Ganderland, sending forth quack teams of Heroes to help bring the unwinding world beak together.

An immediately relevant thing is that she created the New Pelorian script (and possibly the spoken language?). Her Masks last longer than her brother's (her current one has been operating for over a hundred years. Two whole Wanes!) and she has a private army. Sources differ on just what this army does. She resides in Graclodont, a city near the northern borders of the Empire and close to the division between the Heartlands and Western Reaches. She's also Moonson's "Lunar Other", as opposed to Sheng, his "Solar Other". What does all this add up to? One possible interpretation is that she's effectively the head of the security forces for the Lunar Empire. Depending on your sympathies, this could make her J. Edgar Hoover, M (with Jar-eel as Bond?), Felix Dzerzhinsky, Cardinal Richelieu or Milady de Winter, or John le Carré's Karla. Of course, she might also just be a nice old woman with a soft heart for the poor and lowly, always willing to speak up on their behalf.

A theory that feels less and less dumb the more I think about it: The Crimson Bat does not destroy the souls of those it devours. In a literal application of "We Are All Us", those who are eaten by the Bat become part of the Bat. (Only the most Lunatic acolytes of the Bat's cult are willing to proselytize for being eaten by the Bat as a good thing, but many secretly believe it and abnegate themselves as unworthy of such close contact with Sedenya as to become part of Her favored pet and steed.)

Sure, but that contravenes the notion that Sartar can't possibly stand against the Empire solely because it's small, rather than because it's a small, historically hostile polity sitting directly on the pathway to Karse and Nochet. Which is something that could theoretically be dealt with by statecraft (even if that statecraft would be so unpleasant as to make it an impractical option) as opposed to a Lunar Empire that is solely concerned with domination and conquest and thus must necessarily be opposed by assembling a plucky confederation of heroic states and chiefdoms etc etc.

"Sartar could never bring enough resources to bear to more than temporarily halt the onslaught of the Lunars" And yet Talastar and Brolia remain politically independent, with the only demand placed on them by the Lunars being a pro forma expression of religious conversion. Rather strange, that.

A little disquisition on dumb: Last December, I wrote a little piece that you can read here: https://eightarmsandthemask.blogspot.com/2019/12/the-good-emperor-phargentes-younger.html It was inspired by another piece I'd written a little bit earlier where I sat and meditated upon the White Moon Rebellion and on the paradox between the violence and the pacifism, and I drew a historical parallel to the Ikko-ikki and Pure Land Buddhism in Japanese history, and then I posited Phargentes the Younger (being the end of the Lunar Empire's own Sengoku Jidai) as an equivalent to Oda Nobunaga. Why Nobunaga and not Toyotomi Hideyoshi or Tokugawa Ieyasu? Well, there's another inspiration here, and it's that one of the other fandoms that I'm peripherally involved in has Oda Nobunaga as a character, with two versions- one is a tiny, gremlinish woman who talks in gamerspeak and dresses in an androgynous military uniform, and the other is a six-foot-plus woman who wears fantasy villain garb and talks like a lesbian's dream. With, and this is critical, red hair and red eyes. I sat there and I 🤔'd, and then my mind put it together. So, in order to explain the illustrations (enjoy the alt-text on the second one, by the way, if you do click through), I proposed, tongue buried so firmly in my cheek I think it took most of the next 24 hours to fully extract it, that there was an artistic style wherein the Red Emperor, to denote that he was the son of Sedenya, would be depicted with breasts and hips, and then cracked wise about what it would look like for the old-guy Mask and the ferociously bearded Mask. I then sent it to a friend who's on the fringe of Gloranthaphilia. He responded, after reading it, "I thought the Red Emperors were all women doing the Hatshepshut thing and everyone was too humiliated by the fact to be honest in written records." And that, I believe, is the serendipity of dumb.

I don't know if you can get dumber for Ralzakark theories than that scorpion-arm and unicorn are just two guys with the same name.

We really need four or five explanations of why people fall in Glorantha. 1. (Theistic) Uleria's Love holds the universe together, and those things she Loves mostly strongly have the least ability to move away from her. Curse Uleria, and her clinginess! 2. (Logical/Humanistic) Like attracts to like. Humans are primarily made of Earth and Water, and so they are pulled towards the center of the cube of Earth. Humans have large proportions of Fire and Air, so they stand upright, unlike snakes or fish. And when they sleep, they lie down, because the Darkness within pulls them towards the Underworld. If we had but bodies with water that was also Fire, we might fly. 3. (Animistic) Humans pull upon the spirits of the earth whenever they walk, trying to lift them away with their feet. The spirits pull back, and because they are much larger than people, the people stay on the ground and the spirits are not pulled away by our feet. Unless you know the right trick to it. 4. (Mystic) We do? 5. (Lunar) We fall so that we know how it feels to fall, and from that knowing, we shall fly.

A major question to consider is this: Who were the core of the Bright Empire/Empire of Light? That is, when we describe a polity as an empire, we are saying that it is composed of several different groups of people, and that there is a core and a periphery, and the core takes things from the periphery. For the Bright Empire, we can say that the people of Kerofinela certainly saw themselves as part of the periphery. Who made up the core? We know a few names- Lokamayadon, Palangio, others I can't recall offhand. Palangio is from Rinliddi, Lokamayadon from Talastar. Dorastor itself was the geographical core of the Bright Empire. Who lived there before Nysalor was born? Who lived there while Nysalor did? One possibility is that the Bright Empire revolved around the creation of a kind of synthetic identity which allowed Dara Happans and Talastari and mostali and aldryami to all be considered part of the elite core of the Empire of Light, but that seems speculative and also kind of an ourobouros: who convinces them to start doing this in time for the Battle of Night and Day in 379 and Lokamayadon revealing his High Storm that same year, given that Nysalor is all of four years old at that time and the God Project 14?

Oh, the Lunars are definitely descended from Nysalor, and the vast majority of people accept that claim, whether they remember Nysalor fondly or hostilely.

The Lunars claim they do, but the Jernotie and Atarks stories date to an earlier phase of mythological time than the Rashoran/a stories (eg they're not taking place in the apocalyptic wasteland in which Rashorana, the Tormented Woman, hangs upside down and impaled, they're taking place in a kind of primordial universe where Jernotie is out and doing things rather than sitting on a mountain.) And the Lunars claim that these are earlier forms of Rashorana/Sedenya, in any case.

Some immediate thoughts: I'm not sure that draconic mysticism is canonically a form of Illumination or brings Illumination, but if it is (and it certainly makes sense that it would be), then Vithelan mysticism should also be on that list, as its own bullet point. Yelmic White Sun Illumination is another Pelorian example. I don't believe there's any specific examples of MSE schools that practiced Illumination currently and/or canonically. My speculation/invention/interpretation (pick any two): The basic insight that makes up Illumination is simple: "There is nothing to be afraid of." This is of course a Lunar view, but it's also one that has some monomythic support (eg in the story of the Unholy Trio in King of Sartar). This realization confers no fantastical powers in and of itself, but what it does do is allow you to recognize frightening truths about the universe. So you could (to provide the orthodox Yelmic understanding of Yelm's Illumination) understand that the One is Many and the Many are One and therefore that there is no firm line between yourself and other people, or between clean and unclean things. This is ordinarily too frightening to recognize- to accept it would be to accept that everything you believe, as a good Dara Happan, is false. But with the Illuminated intellect, it's possible to understand how both of these things can be true and accept the insight that the One is Many and the Many are One into yourself, and that your Other is really just You. Note that this is an insight that is fundamentally nonsensical to a Sartarite because they don't have the culture that produces beliefs in One, Many, cleanness and uncleanness, et cetera necessary to understand why this insight is such a big leap. So Illumination to them means something very different! It might come as, say, a realization that everyone is kin, or that all kinship is fictive. The broad point is that Illumination allows you to peek outside of your cultural perspective for a bit and understand truths that are normally veiled. Thus, the reason why Illuminates can become so powerful is because they can peer into truths that they would normally not be able to understand without abandoning some of the truths they knew previously, and they are able to (hypothetically) reconcile these truths together. These are capacities rather than demands, of course, and the notion of Occlusion demonstrates that it's hardly impossible for an Illuminate to conceal the truth from themselves. (Or to put it in slightly more game-mechanical terms, Spirits of Reprisal affect you because you're in tension over holding mutually incompatible truths in your head, and by making the truths compatible, Illumination makes it difficult for them to affect you because you're invisible to their radar, as it were.)

Minor note: the pre-Lunar Dara Happan sources we have don't make the connection between "Sedenya the Changer" and "Verithurus/a". The former is one of the slayers of Yelm and later a contender in the War of Many Suns, the protector of Mernita. The latter is, in feminine guise, one of Yelm's suitors, and in masculine guise, one of the proctors of the Ten Tests. Lesilla appears in the Plentonic commentary on the Gods Wall as the "goddess of mothers", while Gerra is the "goddess of sorrow", but their position in Lunar myths is absent from the Glorious Reascent. Rashorana also appears as the "tortured woman" on the Gods Wall, while Verithurus/a and Zayenera/s appear in their places as children of Yelm. Natha is noted as keeper of the Second Hell. Only Orogeria/Ulurda is totally absent from the Gods Wall in Plentonius's commentary... If we had a better idea of where some of these stories come from (it's entirely possible that the extant Lesilla and Gerra stories just aren't recorded by Plentonius but existed in his time) we would have a better sense of what it means in an emic sense for the various stories to be combined together into a single mythical story.

I think that to a certain extent this is backwards- other methods of Illumination generally involve an elaborate method of schooling to prepare you for the awakening. That's how EWF mysticism worked before the rise of the Short Cuts, that's how Kralori mysticism works minus the Path of Immanent Mastery, that's how Orlanth mysticism works too- you spend decades or hundreds of years practicing your breathing before you open your third eye- and that's probably how White Sun Illumination works. But you don't actually need any of that, it's all just safety nets to give you a grounding when you awaken to the nature of reality and realize just how much freedom you really have. Nysalorean riddles will stretch your mind enough to jog that third eye loose and open it wide. So the Lunar Way teaches that you can reach the low stage of enlightenment called Illumination in any way you please. You can become Illuminated by the Gerra rites, third eye bursting forth during the aftercare. You can become Illuminated by mixing drugs in exciting new ways. You can become Illuminated by getting tossed out of your body and looking at a Lune directly in the eyes. You can become Illuminated by indulging in pure excess, or by indulging in deep asceticism, or by both. And you can also do it the safe way, by studying Sedenyic writings and meditating and repeating mantras and making sure to do your mudras. If you're a nerd. So Examiners emerge because proceeding down the left-hand paths stands a high chance of turning you into a wreck of a human being, which they call "Occlusion", and if you proceed down the pathway to the higher enlightenment with that kind of development, you get Zho Lath Ey. (I think Examiners definitely became much more important post-Sheng.) The necessity of imposing some kind of order on enlightenment so that you don't get demon bodhisattvas running around creates the preconditions for a tight ideological grasp on Lunar higher ministries and recognition of officially Sevened individuals. Would it be better to perhaps restrict Illumination so that you don't have this problem in the first place? Perhaps, but 1) Sedenya's divine Lunacy necessarily animates everything we do and 2) restricting Illumination to monastic study takes it from out of the hands of the people unless you implement a significantly more controlling police state that can shuffle people around at random.

Argrath was the destroyer of the world, but destruction is necessary for rebirth.

Well now, I haven't said anything about "necessary", because that imputes a level of organization and communication with the divine that nobody in the setting possesses, and even if we assume that the relatively frequent contact with the Red Moon and the handful of operating demigods in the Lunar Empire means that they have a higher level of communication with the divine, this is surely negated, if not outweighed, by the fact that the Red Goddess is significantly less coherent in Her communication with Her worshipers. I think arguing that the Windstop is a recreation of the Greater Darkness is rather fraught from a mythological perspective- it seems that way to Sartarites for whom Orlanth and Ernalda are central to the cosmos, but there's no shredding of reality. There's no Shadow's Good Shadow popping up, or sections of ground suddenly and without fanfare turning to gorp. It's a deadly unending winter where only Molanni reigns and the ground is infertile, which is bad enough, but it very obviously isn't the end of the world. The Fimbulwinter is the predecessor to Ragnarok, not Ragnarok itself. But that's not really relevant here. Even pointing out that the decision to put so much effort into the siege of Whitewall, which I believe is what caused Orlanth's death when Whitewall fell (in that by literalizing Whitewall as the "last rebel city" it became identified with Rebellus Terminus/Orlanatus/Orlanth) is not especially relevant here, nor pointing out that there was substantial difference of opinion on whether to focus on Whitewall and the Volsaxi or on Esrolia between Tatius and Fazzur, and we know that Fazzur is hardly some provincial rube when it comes to the Lunar Way, and thus any assertion that the death of Orlanth and the Windstop was an inevitable consequence of the Way or of the Empire requires making assumptions about what the real will of Sedenya is that are just not really justifiable on the existing material, all of that is also not especially relevant. The real discussion here is basically, "The Lunars and their goddess are intrinsically opposed to continued life on Glorantha" versus "No, they're not". Which is not an especially interesting discussion, because it amounts to "the Lunars have a dissident take on what Chaos is, therefore they want, or are OK with, or would necessarily cause, Wakboth II: Electric Boogaloo." Which is fairly well false. The Lunars still position the Devil as the source of ultimate moral evil in the universe, and identify their Blaskarth-Devil with Wakboth, Kajabor, Sekever, etc. They have a fairly outre take on just what the Devil actually is, but they still position the great triumph of Sedenya and the recovery of her divinity as being through overcoming the Devil. Furthermore, the Lunars aren't intrinsically opposed to the Storm Bull cult, since they don't ban it like they ban Orlanth's, and don't even try to restrict the Storm Bull cultists that surround the Block. There's no particular reason to think that the Reaching Moon Temple would short out the Block, then, because there's no grand mythical opposition present which would counter the cosmogonic act of laying down the Law on Wakboth. You can point to Lunars being somewhat more intolerant of Storm Bully antics than Praxians or Sartarites, perhaps. You can suggest that conflict is inevitable because Storm Bullies will locate Centurion Incontinentia Secunda and that tiny, little, minuscule Chaos taint she picked up from a Chaos Gift spell a decade ago and start a fight, but that's not a grand mythic opposition. But the idea that Lunar victory in Sartar and Prax means a big gribbly monster bursting from beneath the Block and going "Muahahaha" and devouring life and existence as an inevitable and natural consequence of their rule over a fairly small corner of the world just isn't justifiable. Hell, even the idea that Lunars would necessarily act to protect random broos or walktapi that Storm Bullies went after is frankly inconceivable. So when the stakes are set at that level, it's really not a very interesting discussion because of course the Lunars aren't inimical to life by essence, unless you're stuck on viewing them in the Warhammer mode. There are more interesting discussions to be had about how justifiable the Lunar Way is and whether it can be described as true or not, but they're just not happening if the opening is "The completion of the Reaching Moon Temple would have killed Storm Bull and recreated the Devil."