Eff

3 hours ago, scott-martin said:

/K/ or hard /c/ has been discussed. There may have been a deeper trick involved here where  rotated left became the K and  rotated right became C but as with the Khordavic alphabet I don't think there was much practical difference in which direction the sacrificial man was facing. I like HMKT and karmania. You might prefer humct and carmania. 
 

Let's get stupid. We've got a goddess named Charmain who presumably had some cultic existence around Lake Oronin before Syranthir arrives. We have a "child" of hers, Carmanos, who gives the followers of Syranthir an endonym and eventually a toponym- Carmanians, Carmania. I think we have a bit of a shibboleth situation here- Charmain uses that pesky /ch/, Syranthir's followers say it "sibboleth" (well, "carmain" or "carman"), and then we have the terminal masculine -os added on. Leaving aside the question of whether this is "Charmain's boy" or "Boymoding Charmain" or "Char Aznable", the noble caste are karmanoi, firmly with a hard-c or /k/. But I suspect that the Pelandan peasantry of Teelo Estara's day would have referred to themselves as under the reign of the "Charmanians" (the dipthong compressing down), part of the empire of "Charmania". /ch/ is supposedly rare and foreign to Dara Happa, but Charmain herself would also be foreign to Peloria, given that Lake Oronin replaced a "mountain of fire". 

I suspect linguistic difficulties like these would be understood as part of the Combine and Separate sorcerous actions acting on gods/the world... 

8 hours ago, zoomzoombug said:

Hi, 

To my understanding, Dawn Age Orlanthi thought Elmal was the Sun, but now in the Third Age, everyone agrees Yelm is the Sun, and Elmal is a narrow view of Yelmalio the Lightfore.

In the Dawn Age, did worshipping Elmal grant fire powers? If not, wouldn’t it have seemed weird that the fiery Sun Disk didn’t grant fire magic? 
Did the worship “go” to Elmal, who is Lightfore, or to the Sun Disk, associated with Yelm?

Thanks in advance for the clarification.

 

 

It would have seemed weird, I think, to believe the Sun was cold and dead. However, I don't think there's any coherent answer here because the Elmal material was produced initially under a very different cosmological understanding of Glorantha, one where it was plausible for a god to be both a hypostasis of a bigger entity (the Sun Horse that pulls the bigger disk) and a separate celestial entity in its own right (yellow planet). It is not so plausible now, so the Elmal material cannot ever be truly coherent in its own terms. 

4 hours ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

1. Gloranthan gods are totally real, worshippers know for an absolute fact that they are real, and know that they will be punished or rewarded for their actions.
2. Gloranthans (in this case, Praxians, who include lots of Storm Bulls) are pragmatic and will often ally with chaos.

Its difficult to accept both of these...  I conclude that #2 is false, one of many totally natural missteps made in the long and wonderful development of Glorantha.

Well, there's an implicit 3 in there:

3. The Praxian religious system doesn't consider the recruitment of broo (or the use of any of the Chaotic spirits from Nomad Gods up to and including Thed) a source of impurity that puts the gods' noses out of joint.

Which does resolve that disparity for this specific case. We can also propose a 4 and a 5:

4. Because Praxians are known for their stern attitude towards Chaos and Chaotic things, most of the rest of Glorantha should be at most as willing to tolerate interactions with Chaotic entities on this level, and probably more tolerant, on an overall social level. 

5. If this level of interaction with Chaotic entities is generally acceptable on a religious level, then it is extremely questionable whether the absolutist statements about Chaos's inimicality towards life should be taken as truthful on their face, and if we do take them as truthful on their face, we should then question the competence of the gods directly. 

This is of course disquieting and upsetting and all that, but perhaps it's worth playing out. 

Making the curse a product of initiation allows players to more easily justify violence against Telmori because now they chose evil/chaos, and it removes many kinds of thorny questions about whether collective punishment is bad from the equation by assuring us that no children are affected and nobody is affected unless they chose to be. As such, the intent might just be that there are no good Telmori in the context of areas intended for play, and "good Telmori" refused to initiate to Telmor.

11 hours ago, DrGoth said:

Do we really need a strict answer to this?  I mean that quite seriously. YGMV.  YGWV. Some may take a very Urox approach "Chaos! Die!".  Others may take something analogous to "Nuclear bombs bad, nuclear medicine good" view of it.  Some may want a game where their players can work out which of those (or something else) it is.

I have my own view on this. But really, that only matters in that it is my own view. Which I can implement in my games. All I ask is the freedom to do that. I remember what first drew me to Glorantha:

• it wasn't medieval Europe with wizards
• it was wonderfully deep
• it wasn't black and white

It's the last of those that is relevant here. What I want is the freedom for each gaming group to decide for itself where they want the truth for their game to lie.  I don't want someone telling me that the right way to play in the world is "Chaos is absolutely evil, no two ways about it.  If you are playing any other way you are wrong."  I also don't want someone telling me "The Lunars are absolutely right.  Using chaos is the way to go.  If you are playing any other way you are wrong."

There are options, there are different takes. Even if I agree with one of the statements in the preceding paragraph (in the sense that that is how I want to portray it in my game) I don't want anyone saying that it is the "one true way to play in Glorantha"(tm). I think it was a wonderfully clever move that the descriptions of illumination on p 724 of the guide were presented as direct quotes from Gloranthan documents.  I take it as they are not meant to be read as the objective truth.  Space is left for your gaming group to explore, discover and define the truth for their Glorantha.

Now, to indulge my own views for a moment. Is Nysalor Gbaji? Or was Arkat?  Or, in the end, were they both Gbaji? And, whatever the answer there, were they always Gbaji or did they fall?  Someone who was good can turn bad.  Don't assume how someone ended up is how they always were.

The flexibility or multiplicity of mythology in the real world is a very potent aspect of Glorantha, not least because it makes it much more playable. Instead of having to conform closely to a specific text that carries the absolute truth which may not be questioned, the players of a given game can and will adapt the presented material to their own ends and interests based on what resonates with them. It's quite possible to play games where Chaos is irrelevant (I've done that), games where Chaos is non-eschatological, games where Chaos is truly amoral, games where Chaos is Moorcockian, or Luciferian, or like the use of the term in academic study of mythology. It's even possible to play games where Chaos is eschatological, both evil and amoral simultaneously, an incursion into reality and also an expression of Lovecraftian horror at the reality of the cosmos at the same time, etc., and so much the better for all of us. 

I think that this entire discussion is predicated on taking it for granted that chaos means the end of everything, when the comment which precipitated it was about the openness of whether that was the case or not, and whether other interpretations of chaos and chaos's positionality ought to be foreclosed within the text(s) or left somewhat open. Which in turn points at a kind of metadiscussion about whether Gloranthan doohickeys should be understood as metaphorical or as imagined noumena and to what degree for either. 

1 hour ago, Shiningbrow said:

Either way, it doesn't answer the question. Does your idea of religious practice in Glorantha also apply to Lay Members?

 

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.

6 hours ago, Shiningbrow said:

You appear to be referring more specifically to those in Glorantha who have initiated into a cult.

Would you say the same for Lay Members? The generally much higher population percentage of those who just want to get on with their lives and let the gods and their adherents do what they want, but occasionally show up to a religious ceremony to remain on sufficiently good terms to be able to get some physical benefits from them (and, of course, those many that don't even bother with that).

And so, the Runes only relate to personality traits - and even that is merely a RQ useful construct. I, personally, don't see the relationship of the Runes when it comes to Lay Members. (Everyone in Glorantha has "Runic Affinities", regardless of their attitudes towards the specific, individual gods)

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.

On 5/3/2023 at 1:32 AM, Shiningbrow said:

It appears to me (given some of your specific references), that you were focussing your attention on only a small subset of those people and religious practices (i.e., central/western European). Or perhaps you were using very specific definitions when you were writing this.

You're obviously correct that no-one on Earth in the ancient days worshipped Orlanth or Ernalda (literally), but I'm taking the 'like' as an important word here.

In Glorantha, there are many ways to follow (or not) certain gods (or great spirits... or even minor spirits) which parallel some ancient (people/individuals) religious (and social) practices.

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. 

20 hours ago, Shiningbrow said:

Except - it's not true.

Many in the ancient world (and not so ancient world) practice religion like in Glorantha.

The only difference is that in Glorantha, other gods are just as real as yours. IRL, that's not true (mostly).

This thing about magic - believe me when I say that people have believed in miracles (or magic) from various sources for tens of thousands of years. We should look at it like a rather weak god with little Rune Magic.

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.

17 hours ago, Akhôrahil said:

The mythic Green Age and what the Praxians call the pre-Chaos Green Age aren't necessarily the same thing? Genert's Garden (the Praxian idea of a green age) is at least substantially a Golden Age phenomenon - it's even there into the Storm Age/Lesser Darkness and only destroyed when fighting Chaos.

So any Pavisite "Green Age" projects aren't actually "the" Green Age, but likely Golden Age and/or Storm Age?

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:

3 hours ago, jajagappa said:

Actually Jeff has explicitly said that is not the case. He's noted that Yelmalions include both heavy infantry and horse riders. The assumption of pike-wielders is from players based on the Sun County model and the training in 2H pike with shield. 

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).

1 hour ago, Richard S. said:

No cult has a complete monoculture.

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. 

4 hours ago, AndreJarosch said:

I don´t want to derail this tread, but: 

Since the spirit of a dead person can (will?) be reborn at some point, is this ancestor gone, and no longer available via ancestor worship when he is reincarnated?

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. 

2 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

This is why the king of the gods is a puffed-up windbag: “I am big. I exist. I only look like a void.”

Stafford as Trickster — so he is putting us on: Nirvana doesn’t really top his list of evils. Stafford as Arkati Trickster — hell, maybe he does mean it.

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

18 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

But conventional sages don't really talk much about what the lunar elites really think about.

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.  

1 hour ago, Bren said:

A koku is 48 gallons. Wikipedia tells me a koku of rice is enough rice to feed 1 person for a year. (And presumably they don't only eat rice.)

A bushel is 8 gallons. Clearly, that is not enough to feed 1 person for a year.

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.

4 hours ago, Mirza said:

Legumes (I could be completely wrong here): Speculatively a common source of protein in the commoner Sartarite diet, similarly to grains, I don't know the varieties, how much they eat, or if they even do.

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. 

4 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

1. How intimate is the connection between the Red Goddess and the Crimson Bat? “The one rides on the back of the other,” you say, but the Goddess is a moon — how does that work?

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.

46 minutes ago, Joerg said:

Whereever and however that happened, the Trio and their despicable child were banished from Creation, and they collected allies not of the Cosmos. Following the lead of Wakboth, the Trio and their new accomplices entered Creation from the weakness caused by Shargash crashing Umath into the Northern Pillar. What followed was the Chaos invasion of the Lesser Darkness (still), with the course of the Chaos forces mapped in Troll Pak.

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. 

2 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Don’t you just want the Uleria cult to be a hiding-in-plain-sight mask of capital ‘D’ Devil worshippers? I mean, subbing for the true “energy which can fill and permeate anything” — — as it slouches toward Bethlehem to be born: MGF!

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.