Eff

Well, my idea of religious practice in Glorantha, or rather my analysis of what has been said about it, (as opposed to how I might synthesize the various ideas that have appeared across Gloranthan writings of various stripes across various decades) is that the laity have a relationship much more in the line of do ut des, but that this transactional relationship with the divine Other is also one that doesn't have the capacity to affect the world beyond human abilities. You can get battle magic/spirit magic, but those are from the mortal aspects of the cult as an organization and have been such since 1978, where Rune Priests could invent new Battle Magic spells entirely on their own. And one way in which I might engage in my own personal synthesis would be to question whether this "really" is the case, and perhaps rethink the context of rune cults and initiation and cult membership and so on.

https://wellofdaliath.chaosium.com/a-few-rules-of-thumb/ So within the current incarnation of official Glorantha, the overwhelming majority of people are initiates to a single cult. That is how religion is intended to work in the setting now. That is what I am talking about.

Yes. To be quite specific, I am talking about the ways in which Gloranthan theistic worship is defined to primarily involve psychological sympathy with the deity being worshiped, which is most explicit in Runequest: Roleplaying in Glorantha (2018) where Runes define personality characteristics and also must be at a certain quantity to allow worship of a particular god in a particular cult, but which is also present in explicit form in Heroquest Glorantha (2015) and has implicit expression throughout previous texts through the notion of "heroforming". And that phenomenon is what separates Gloranthan religion from that of Classical Antiquity, from that of Mesopotamia and and the Levant in the Bronze Age, from that of Egypt's Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms, from that of Zhou, Warring States, Qin, and Han China, from that of Vedic India and of "Second Urbanization" India, from that of Classical Mayan civilization and that of Teotihuacan, insofar as we can know anything about the religions of those places and times. Because the emphasis is on actions. The proper performance of rituals. The concepts of dharma and rta, of ma'at. When Inanna returns from the underworld, it is because of the proper performance of the actions of mourning by Ninshubur, and Dumuzid's failure to perform these actions is why he is taken to the underworld in Inanna's place (in the version that has entered pop culture). Gloranthans may engage in rituals similar on their surface to ones performed by people in historical antiquity. But so does a modern slaughterhouse, along a different axis. The ideological basis for these rituals matters, and for Gloranthans, the rituals are related to their psychological overlap with their god, which is entirely inconsistent with the archaeological and textual evidence in the real world, which is strongly suggestive of the idea that rituals were related to the distance between gods and people- they must be performed exactly because there is a substantial Otherness to the gods and we cannot communicate a need for flexibility reliably.

On the contrary, Gloranthan theistic religion's emphasis on the necessity of psychological similarity between the worshiper and the god is an entirely modern thing. It exists as a development of modern psychology and the adaptations of magical practice to the 19th and 20th centuries. It cannot really be found in the descriptions of religious practice, which are focused primarily on proper action, with proper mindset being implicit to one's status as a different kind of person. It certainly seems beyond belief that ostraca and votive offerings were used in the context of the offerers believing they needed to think like the god. Contemporary pagans and occultists often seem to feel the need to retroject their practices as continuous and antique, just like traditional religion's practitioners did. But to confuse for would be a mistake.

The quote from Thunder Rebels is from the presumed perspective of a member of a society where Orlanth is a preeminent god. So, here are some more options: 4. it was written by someone as an example of an alien perspective to help people play the roles of people with that alien perspective, 5. it was written as an example of a deliberately flawed and inadequate perspective to push people into playing more rounded human beings who have conflicts and tensions with their religion. I think that there's an entirely separate factor here, which is that Gloranthan religions as they are understood in the contemporary fandom's center are actually neither paleopagan nor Christian, they're (without much acknowledgement) primarily derived from contemporary occultism and para-occult beliefs like Jungian psychoanalysis and Julian Jaynes. Nobody in the actual ancient world, so far as we can tell, understood themselves as being psychologically in-tune with a god in order for that god to be their patron or for themselves to become a member of a mystery cult related to that god- indeed, the distance between the god and the person seems to have been very relevant for Apuleius in The Golden Ass. But this is how contemporary occultism understands theurgy, invocation as opposed to evocation, and (though chaos magick isn't invoked all that close to the surface) godforming- which does have a parallel in "heroforming". Because of this factor, which has grown more and more important as the Runes have become more and more definitional of characters, and characters have become more and more defined in advance in the games that have been released, it is thus impossible to have a "bronze age" or "antiquity" feel to Glorantha, because nobody in Glorantha practices religion like anyone in the ancient world did. (Gloranthan shamanism is a bit closer to the real world, but it has become subsumed under the theurgic-industrial complex, while sorcery is straightforwardly the ceremonial magician or Thelemic left-hand path of thaumaturgy. Mysticism managed to break a window and excuse itself, though.) Because of this, Gloranthan religion within the recent context is necessarily both moralistic and deeply immoral- there is a code of actions, but it is divorced from any kind of reasoning or explanation, but simply relies on subordinating itself to the god. Similarly, the confusion between whether it is fellow humans or inexorable, mechanistic divine will which punishes the transgressors against cult strictures is characteristic of occultist environments being perceived by outsiders. Now, with that being said, the enlightened Gloranthan understands the world a bit differently. They're able to move between gods for different purposes and different times, they can tell a god, "no". They're more like a modern chaos magician... or like someone from antiquity, or like the Yukaghir hunters quoted in this article: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/36/61261/laughing-at-the-spirits-in-north-siberia-is-animism-being-taken-too-seriously/. It should also be noted that enlightenment, flimsily disguised behind the phrase "illumination", is understood as morally suspect and dangerous within the fandom center, one suspects because it allows people to disregard that beautifully constructed opposition between theurgy and thaumaturgy, their cunning evocations of the sage Carl Jung. So it goes. Someday, they might recognize that if you see the Buddha in the center of the road, you've gotta run your panel van with the Hawkwind album covers on both sides up to highway speeds and keep going.

Genert's Garden in that mythology is a symbol like Cockaigne or the Big Rock Candy Mountain. Everything is good, nothing hurts, and there's plenty of food. But in the Golden Age, there are emperors and exiles, there are servants and masters. There's violence/conflict/Kargan Tor. But the Green Age doesn't have to end at the same time for everyone.

There is a secret phrase known only to those who have been to the Red Moon and in the presence of a moon goddess, whether the big S herself or one of the ancient ones. It reads as follows:

And yet again and again, this is the default model that is used when talking about Yelmalio casually- the fact that Yelmalio cultists are strong because they fight in a pike phalanx, for example. Whatever might be said about what particular Chaosium people say directly, what is assumed in the background is the "Sun County model" (just as the corebook deletes Riding from the RQ2 writeup as a skill).

That's an assertion, not a textual statement. I think it's a perfectly reasonable assertion to make, but as things are textually, there are no differences in the Yelmalio cult across the cultures of the core book that are represented in the core book, and the way in which extratextual commentary adjusts them to accommodate people who are pastoral impala and ostrich herders is simply to remove the Pike skill and not replace it with anything, and also to remove Rune Priests from their cult. When Chaosium creative staff talk about Yelmalio, the assumption is that Yelmalio cultist characters, player or otherwise, are people with pikes who stand in a big square block of 16x16 or multiples of such. Indeed, if you assume that cults are the product of interactions with something like a Jungian archetype, they by definition would be universal across cultures, because Jung's hypothesis of archetypes posited them as truly universal to all humans, or else they might exist in degraded and inferior forms from the true awareness of the archetype, like with the Praxian Yelmalio cults that simply have an inferior understanding of the god and a worse connection to him. And even if we assume that there are some unexpressed differences, these don't matter enough to interact with player characters in any fashion- by the text, player characters can walk into any Sun Dome anywhere and have no difficulties with participating in ceremonies and rituals, so in practical effect, the cults are homogenous and monocultural if you play by the book.

In the real world, ancestor veneration (which is the better term for what's going on in Gloranthan texts typically) and acceptance of reincarnation are quite compatible with one another. There are of course fine-grained metaphysical understandings of these things and how they mesh with one another (do some reading on the Ghost Festival in China and its Taoist and Buddhist origins, or on the distinctions between a tamaya, kamidana, and a butsudan are in a Japanese context, for two specific examples), but developing those in play seems like quite the enjoyable time to me.

It is worth noting that King of Dragon Pass begins more than 40 years before the year Sartar sets foot in Dragon Pass and at least 120 years before the canonical dates for any civil strife over Elmal and Yelmalio, the game's entire progression is about the formation of a kingdom in and around where Sartar would be normally, and at the start of the game, part of its premise is that Dragon Pass has been empty and the people away to the north are made strange by the intervening events of history, so it would be somewhat strange if its "Elmal narrative" incorporated events from somewhere between 50 and 150 years in the future, and saying it "skipped" anything would be very strange indeed.

"Bears some resemblance" puts me in mind of pratyekabuddhayana, "solitary buddhahood", and how this is sometimes characterized as driven by fear of samsara...

One ponders just how many of the elite have been through some form of Kinderheim 511 or Parallax or IPCRESS. Ah, this thread is about diseases and decay, isn't it? Let's contemplate for a moment that human digestion is partially dependent, including in the absorption of dietary fiber, on gastrointestinal microbiota- fungi, bacteria, archaea, and viruses that live in the gut and eat, and the byproducts of their eating are in turn absorbed by the human body as part of its process of digesting food. Or, to put it another way, the hollow spaces of darkness in the stomach and intestines are where eating becomes beneficial to the body. Decay and disease (which is a leading cause of death) can perhaps be analogized as a broader form of digestion, the goddess Glorantha's gut microbiota (or by comparison to her, perhaps picobiota) breaking down things within her for her to eat and live. It is thus worth pointing out that gut microbiota are external in origin. Which would make them Chaotic, or para-Chaotic. Mallia, defying the metaphysics of the current incarnation of Glorantha, can be Chaotic and not Chaotic. But if you start thinking about such things, then you end up in Lunar territory again, so it is better to shut down our reasoning faculties and go juggle apples.

A bushel of wheat converted to flour at a 75% efficiency, assuming a 2500-kcal daily diet (much less than what you need for heavy physical labor), provides enough food for one person for about 30 days. Eating the raw grain as porridge, you'd be looking at about 40 person-days. About 10 bushels of grain to flour, or 7.5 bushels of raw grain, is sufficient for one person-Gloranthan year.

Legumes, especially pulses (dried legumes used like grains), are a curious lacuna in Glorantha discussions and sources. For context, the "Neolithic founder crops" are eight plant species that were domesticated in Southwest Asia about 12,000 years ago and then went on to be the basis of the agricultural economies of most of Europe, North Africa, and South Asia along with Southwest Asia until the Columbian Exchange, and are still important today. They consist of flax, an oil and fibre crop, emmer wheat, einkorn wheat, barley, three cereal grains- and four pulses. Bitter vetch, chickpeas, lentils, and peas. Much later, the fava or broad bean also came into cultivation in this area. In East Asia we have the adzuki bean (which is used to make red bean paste, among other things), the soybean (many many products you're familiar with) and the mung bean (bean sprouts as a specific food item are from mung or soybeans). And in the Americas, we have the common bean, which is so broad you probably only recognize it via its cultivar groups- kidney beans, navy beans, pinto beans, and the non-pulse wax beans. There's also the scarlet runner bean, or just the runner bean, as well as the lima bean and the tepary bean, as well as peanuts. For most of the world's population throughout most of history, pulses have been the critical source of dietary protein, and in (for example) North America, common beans and maize are seen as two of the Three Sisters of pre-Columbian agriculture, clear equals. Glorantha texts focus on the cereals, however, and it's only in Pamaltela, where things are weird and upside-down, that beans are treated as prevalent. So what do Sartarites grow and eat as far as pulses go? What's their particular crop package? Are we looking at lentils and yellow peas, fava beans and chickpeas? Or do we have frijoles negros? Bao filled with sweet bean paste? These are perhaps the questions of unrepentant bean counters, but maybe the thought of falafel at the Swenston Bob's Bison Burgers sets some gears turning.

It's her wings. You know, her wings. Like that.

The other option I was contemplating is that there is indeed nothing outside of creation, and so the gods annihilated Thed, Mallia, Ragnaglar, and the bouncing baby newborns Wakboth and Kajabor, destroying them completely, exiling them to nothingness... but then they came back.

I have an annoying, Wittgensteinian comment to make- what is outside of creation to be banished to? It might be worth asking if "Chaos" isn't a void but a pleroma, since it seems very inhabited for uncreated nothingness.

Well, not so much. It would be better than a cult that exists to perform emotional labor under a sexuality so fetishized the orgasm disappears, yes. But we can do better. Ul-Eria's got plenty of menace just from good old Zoria, after all.

Two book-length studies of real-world mythology: https://www.amazon.com/Prolonged-Echoes-Medieval-Northern-Collection/dp/8778380081/ref=sr_1_18?qid=1679583287&refinements=p_27%3AMargaret+Clunies+Ross&s=books&sr=1-18 https://www.amazon.com/Old-Enemy-Neil-Forsyth/dp/0691014744/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=the+old+enemy+satan+and+the+combat+myth&qid=1679583525&s=books&sprefix=the+old+enemy+sata%2Cstripbooks%2C108&sr=1-1 Prolonged Echoes talks at length about the interrelations between the cosmological vision of Norse mythology and how that interrelates to sexual anxieties and power dynamics in Norse society. The Old Enemy tracks the development and reappropriation of a particular mytheme or mythological motif and how its meaning transformed, emerging from the same basic elements. Both are very inspirational for interacting with mythology generally and thinking through its possibilities and convolutions. A film: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083931/ Fehérlófia/Son of the White Mare takes stories from Hungarian folklore and presents them in a gorgeously stylized fantasy... with mysterious appearances of apparent modernity. It's got Sun Horse stuff in it, of course, but it also does the Glorantha thing that you experience when you encounter Bob's Bison Burgers- the sudden intrusion of the anachronistic without the out of farce.

Taking as given that culture is subordinate to cults and that the gods only change under the malevolent influence of Chaos, do artistic styles and techniques diffuse in Glorantha? Or are there unchanging, predefined Orlanth artistic styles, Ernalda artistic styles, etc. which are divinely enforced? What happens to people who experiment with new styles of poetry, singing, instrumental music, painting, sculpture, prose? Is the appreciation of novelty one of the signs of being an ogre? Do mystical, sorcerous, and spiritist methods of approaching the world, which do not rely on interactions with unchanging gods, therefore carry the potential for innovation and novelty? One answer: these subcultural phenomena in theism-dominant cultures are what allow for any change to happen at all. Another answer: theism is perpetually threatened by the existence of non-theists, who with their experimental poetry and atonal music and non-figurative sculptures are literally destroying the fabric of the universe. They can be tolerated by carefully segregating them from the mainstream, but crossover religions like the Lunars or EWF are cosmic threats with their funky art, and cannot be tolerated.

To sketch out something very silly, there are several instances of, well, oral fertility that seem to be taking place, but they're trolls and spiders (and scorpions, but we don't talk about that silly Cults of Terror Bagog writeup). So you can perhaps imagine an... ur-Uleria who had a less differentiated approach to this kind of thing. Meanwhile, Dara Happans call that light blue planet "Uleria" because it never enters the Underworld, and we know that Uleria is changed or perhaps diminished from her primordial state. So perhaps those dweebs with their beards and their hatred of alla boscaiola were onto something- there's something associated with the powers of the dark that the common Uleria has no or limited interactions with. (I actually think that, whatever some to-be-published book or preview says, the parthenogenetic magic hinted at for Ernalda's cult is another shattered piece of Uleria- spontaneous germination. You could even push this further into goat-headed territory, but that's heavier stuff and gets right into the controversial Rashoran questions.) So perhaps we can find a motif here wherein the primordial "Glorantay" or "Celestial Court" were also the subjects of a kind of usurpation or shattering that broke their multivalent and ambiguous concepts into smaller pieces.* Like cosmic cartoon mice nibbling at a torch and making a dozen torches. However, Uleria survives (perhaps because her concept is just intrinsically sticky) and the usurpation is left incomplete. So I think that it may well be a kind of cyclic ebb and flow- you have times when the more normie normative goddesses largely displace Uleria and render her marginal, but you also have times where Uleria, smirking, steps into the smoldering void after everything's fallen apart and puts herself back at the center of things. Where do the tricolor goddesses fit into this? Well, Uleria and the red one are the two big connection points to the orthocosmic Ishtar nexus, and, what do you know, they share some pieces in the modestly deep lore, too, don't they? What falls out from that? Well, there's an answer I can give, but there's a limit to how much subliminal libidinality I can stuff into a post, believe it or not. *

It's an extrauniversal statement talking to the reader. What no sane Gloranthan understands, not what no same Gloranthan believes. This is clearly intended to be a true statement about Glorantha's invented metaphysics in its initial context, though who knows what reprints mean by it. This doesn't prevent us from inventing new material to fix this problem. I think it encourages us on some level- certainly, I would prefer to do at least the minimal work not to have to contemplate Orlanth having a death-drive towards universal annihilation, whether that's making it up or pulling out Ron Edwards' fire axe. But the text is the text, I am afraid.

Well, I can't speak for anyone else, but let me spin out a bit of a hypothetical statement. Let's say that you were faced with, on the one hand, the textual presentation of Chaos as a malevolent force in this fictional cosmos, something corrosive or destroying. And on the other hand, you were faced with the problem that the Chaosium (the fountain and not the corporate entity) is also the one thing that prevents Glorantha from freezing into perpetual stasis, and that Chaos would seem to be essential to the universe. And you had to confront the possibility that all those Chaos-hating cults- Storm Bull, Waha, Orlanth-... were ultimately seeking to destroy Glorantha and freeze it in that perpetual stasis. All those gods, even. Cosmically knowledgeable beings... and yet seemingly aiming for self-destruction. Wouldn't it be much easier to draw a distinction between Chaos-as-a-positive and Chaos-as-a-negative and call the former something else?