Eff

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. 

1 hour ago, scott-martin said:

(Sorry, @Eff I mysteriously do not rise to the bait although surely only one of the portals is "fertile.")

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.

*

7 minutes ago, radmonger said:

in the guide to glorantha, that line is prefixed with 'what no sane gloranthan understands'. So those who do understand it are, by induction, insane. So just represents the perspective of the more philosophically inclined chaos cultist.

Of course they could be right, and storm bull and friends could be wrong.

Or there is always the mostali perspective, which can be paraphrased as something like  'warp core ' and 'warp core breach' may share a lot of syllables and some underlying mathematics, but they should not be treated as the same.

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. 

5 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

So Chaos-as-Void seems to fit the pre-Gloranthan, IRL understanding and (IMO) key bits of exposition of Glorantha. It also allows people to take varying attitudes toward Chaos: we can feel differently about it without having to argue about what it is. So what is wrong with this picture? You surely think something is, so help me see the other viewpoint. Pretty please!

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? 

1 hour ago, g33k said:

I kind of feel like people are dancing around the central issue of "return to the prior (ideal) state" that is implicit to Glorantha & Chaos.  Nobody seems to have actually said it.

Chaos is the prior state.
 

Glorantha is the blip, the aberration, the disharmony.

54 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

It is quite the flex yes. I suspect the "neutral" rating from the trad solar establishment is more about unspeakableness than a simple shrug. She is literally unfit for ink. But that said, inner Dendara (as she is experienced by initiates, i.e., "women") is not exactly a trad solar establishment figure.

I was talking about reciprocal initiation originally . . . whether the Uleria rites directly translate to Ernalda / Dendara mysteries or why not. Is she a separate entity or simply singing their songs in a different octave, as it were. This is not a trivial question because she . . . and not Ernalda, much less Dendara . . . owns  and so answering the question might reveal something important about that rune in the world right now.
 

The compatibilities are interesting but obviously two gods can be extremely compatible without sharing an initiation or a cult. 

Yes. You have that motif, don't you? Uleria being feared or hated, and obviously part of that comes, in origin, from the desire to differentiate "our" mode of existence from "their" mode of existence- we think love is good, but these traditional people think love is suspicious and disruptive, and another part of it comes from the vicissitudes of desire, romance, sex, love, and human relationships. And then Uleria's property rights over that hourglass suggest, perhaps, that she's making a statement that Life, as a force, complicates and makes things difficult. Biological exuberance, if you will. 

So in that case, the "reciprocal initiation", the ability to participate and get juiced up, may well be this whimsical, mutable, difficult-to-predict thing. Among the various things Uleria serves, perhaps we can find "headaches" as well. 

1 hour ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

But Uleria is not only sex workers.

I'm going off of the working assumption (which I suspect will likely never really be contradicted editorially) for the purposes of discussing multiple Gloranthas at once that divine cults don't vary significantly from place to place- that if Uleria is there, you get the whole shebang, rather than Pelorian Uleria having only two entrances to her temples (Lodril and Shargash are definitely into that in any case) and the sex work aspect, or the intimacy work aspect if you prefer, being carefully removed. 

And from that, you might think that "good women" like Dendara or her cultists as they are typically presented would perhaps resent the Ulerians who don't play the game of being good and who represent a kind of diffuse existential threat to Dendara/ns. But if that's not the case, then further exploration and development and playfulness is needed. 

(Going by those old Greg notes which equated Dendara with Vishnu and Yelm with Brahma, perhaps the conventional fan understanding of Dendara has been a bit anemic. Severely irony-deficient. Or maybe Greg wasn't aware of the story about Vishnu-as-Mohini attempting to seduce Brahma.) 

14 minutes ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

What does the cult compatibility 

I don't think Uleria is on the old RQ2 cult compatibility table, but I doubt Uleria is or can be hostile to either one.  What their reciprocal attitudes to Uleroa may be is undefined to my knowledge but it can't be hostile or their adherents would die out.

What's interesting about the Uleria-Dendara relationship is what it might imply about Yelm and Dendara's relationship- is Dendara fine with Uleria (are Dendarans fine with Ulerians) because it means Yelm/Yelmites have less sex with her/them, or because Dendarans also have their side pieces? Not that those are the only two options, but given the dynamics of Dendara as a "perfect submissive wife", (with no small hint of irony in the Glorious Reascent, but who knows if it'll be ironic for RQG) there are some fascinating questions to ask about her relationship to sex work and sex workers and the motif of Yelmic sexism and patriarchy.

14 hours ago, John Biles said:

Healing a body is not about synthesis.  IT is, in fact, about returning to the pre-problem state as much as you can.  The essence of being a doctor is not synthesis, it's about returning to the synthesis.  If you had cancer, would you want to accomodate the tumor?

When it comes to cancer, the most effective treatments (radiotherapy, chemotherapy) involve damaging large quantities of healthy tissue. Even surgical excision still requires some damage to healthy tissue, and may require a full removal of an organ, or large parts of one. There is thus a necessity for a kind of synthesis, because there is no guarantee of returning to the thesis, absent the aftereffects of treatment. 

But of course,  is a musical term, referring to multiple independent sounds and their synthesis into a piece of music. 

21 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

One uh "riddle" this poses is how such a gf/bf experience maps across competing ernalda/dendara forms of marriage. We know ernalda and dendara initiations are aggressively non-reciprocal but can a sufficiently advanced uleria initiate worship freely in both temples and others besides? Kierkegaard, perhaps perversely, insists that the answer is no. But there are some mighty advanced ulerians out there.

Yes. Well, that's the benefit of being at the top of the twin pyramids of - you get to interact with the opposing arrowheads of two s at odds, or be between two cosmic mountains, depending on your preferences. (Or perhaps both, there was a time when Uleria had runes in her description.) Maybe that's contingent on being able to recognize that there are more entrances than just three, or that if someone thinks they only have two, they actually have at least four. Who can say? I'm running out of euphemisms and need coffee. 

28 minutes ago, hipsterinspace said:

She is not chaste by any means, she is also the physical act of love, the love of the body. Her priesthood exercise sex as a sacred bond and a ritual art, but more than sex, they offer companionship, they are hetaera not pornoi.  

I would assume that, even if the priesthood offers the girlfriend/boyfriend experience, that the goddess embraces all kinds of sex workers, because it's still intimacy created by the exchange of money. It's like the three entrances to her temple- that's a sex joke. Anything built atop that is built atop the foundation of "Uleria's temples have three entrances just like her body has three holes, har de har", which doesn't invalidate the exegesis, but should, in my opinion, remind us that Uleria is universal and beyond propriety or respectability. Or ought to be. 

The Telmori entry in the Bestiary assumes that all Telmori participate in the involuntary shapeshifting, in addition to the two little lines in the Telmor cult:

"Initiate
Requirements: Everyone born of Telmori parents is
automatically an initiate. Those not born into the tribe must
be adopted before they can join the cult."

Now there's an immediate question here about people marrying into the tribe and whether their children count as "of Telmori parents" or not, and whether they in turn become involuntary shapeshifters and get a wolf companion- indeed, it is questionable from the text if there are any Telmori women at all, since the Telmori and their wolf companions fight "as brothers", not as siblings.

EDIT: By "assumes", I mean that statements like "The Telmori have a simple and primitive physical culture. Since they weekly shed their hands and abandon their tools, they dare not make them too valuable." are somewhat difficult to square with a quarter to a third of Telmori not shapeshifting and presumably being able to pick up and put away dropped tools and possessions while their shapeshifted friends and family try to look sheepish in wolf form.

Wonder if there've been any stolen generations of Telmori children. 

6 hours ago, metcalph said:

I'm finding the theory being advanced that the Telmori could join the cult of Orlanth because the Orlanthi cannot sense their chaotic nature to be somewhat absurd.  There's a huge difference between not being able to sense the chaos of someone in front of you and having your chaotic nature exposed in an initiation ceremony.  

What theory? What people are reacting to is the statement that Orlanth only judges people on their deeds and yet simultaneously Telmori are banned from the cult due to being Chaotic/Chaos-tainted. So how do we reconcile these things together? Is it that Telmori failing to slit their own throats for being Chaos-tainted is sufficiently wicked of a deed to bar them from the cult?

24 minutes ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

As for making the Cinsina and the Praxians "happy", yes, true.  But  wiping out a Tribe of Sartar sets a grim precedent.  Sending the Death Star to ~~Alderan~~, er, the Telmori, might make other tribes wonder if they are next.  This was pointed out by one of my PCs.

You know, I think that you could run with this and the Free Army and make this whole incident part of an effort (by Argrath? by Argrath's supporters in Sartar?) to centralize Sartar and destroy the traditional tribal and city intermediaries and their independent power. Because nobody likes the Telmori and there's the whole "destroyed the Maboder" thing, they serve as the test case for setting up the authority of the Prince to destroy whole tribes as tribal governments. I doubt your game has done much if any groundwork to set this up, because it's a fairly specific thing derived from dull poli-sci books, but I thought of it and decided to say it for anyone to pick up and work with.

Separately, another option for "why do the Wolfrunners exist?" would be that the Prince of Sartar, for ritual reasons, needs to have Telmori bodyguards, and having people with flayed Telmori skins as part of his bodyguard is how Argrath takes care of that ritual reason. Again, bleak. Many of my contributions haven't been the most happy in this thread.

2 hours ago, Dr. Devici said:

That bit about Orlanth is especially weird because shortly after it's mentioned that Orlanth judges people by their deeds and cannot sense chaos. That seems incongruous with the stated reason we don't have any Orlanthi-Telmori.

Yes, it is very incongruous. I actually had never really considered the question of "why don't Telmori initiate to Orlanth?" before that article, because it never seemed relevant- Telmori have such an unusual situation that the idea that they mostly stick with Telmor and sometimes go into "professional" cults like Issaries/CA/Lhankor Mhy and sometimes have embraced cults that offer a possible modification to the werewolf curse, like the Lunars in the immediate timeframe, always was my default.

But now I'm wondering just what's going on there.

44 minutes ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

@David Scott  Thanks for the link to Jeff's article on Well of Daliath.

While I realize that real life people must sometimes be pragmatic, and are flawed, IMO Jeff takes it too far.  Or, alternatively, some of the rules text, e.g. that Storm Bull Initiates are required to investigate any hints or rumors of Chaos personally, or that Orlanthi Wind Lords must fight it to kill it if possible, should be modified / toned down.  IMO, that would actually be a good thing.

e.g. I'd like to see more positive, aspirational material on achieving the Orlanth virtues.  Less bad poetry, and less strict "Thou shall" rules that are very often ignored.  

I have to admit, my eyebrows raised quite high at Telmori being barred from the Orlanth cult but the Orlanth cultists (or the god himself, it's not entirely clear to me) being willing to make use of the Telmori as inferiors. But as for the Storm Bull cult apparently only being held back from exterminating the Telmori due to their insufficient numbers, well... isn't that interesting? 

On a side note to one of my earlier suggestions, Argrath doesn't seem to have many, if any morokanth in his Barbarian Horde. It's entirely plausible he's just prejudiced against non-humans!

This thread takes as a premise that Argrath did in fact wipe out the Telmori in 1627, so arguing that he didn't, the Wolfrunner chit is just the Telmori, or it didn't happen at all, doesn't seem to help Mr. @Rodney Dangerduck with his inquiries. 

A couple of other potential factors you can use here:

-Argrath seems to have a number of Storm Bull cultists in his army, so it may be a way to keep their firm support by offering them violence against a "Chaotic"/"Chaos-tainted" target, in particular if he doesn't want to pillage Alda-Chur or deeper in Tarsh, or can't. 

-Argrath is aiming to distance himself from the previous princes Kallyr and Salinarg by emphasizing that he's for humans and against non-humans/werewolves. Perhaps around this time the three duck Sartar City Militia chits are dispatched to Delecti and the Ivory Plinth.

-The Telmori, with their coincidental Red Moon associations, are a viable, ethnically distinct target for unifying Sartarites against the Lunars without going through the difficulties of purging every 7 Mothers convert. 

-Argrath believes that as Arkat reborn it is his duty to finish the job Arkat started through violence against the werewolves. 

-The Telmori refused to join Argrath initially and he takes vengeance against them as backsliders and forms the Wolfrunners as a positive side effect. 

-The Telmori stand in the way of Argrath clear-cutting their forested lands to fuel a heavily expanded weapons industry, and Argrath can sidestep the power of the oaths and obligations between the werewolves and the principality through mass murder. 

All of these are of course bleak, but ethnic cleansing and genocide kind of are that way no matter what. 

17 minutes ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

ok but let's do some exegesis on the meaning of the narrative that Wakboth slew Kajabor! If they are the same, what is this meaning? Does it demonstrate the tainting of Chaos by Creation, making dead Kajabor the Death rune form of Chaos?

It's mirroring the falling-out between the conspirators against Yelm (Murharzarm edition), (or rather the Glorious Reascent provided a prequel civil war between victorious divine rebels) and Humakt slaying Orlanth in the "Sword Story", so if we take it as true that they're the same entity, it perhaps becomes a mocking puppet-show of the gods' own actions and how they've doomed the world. 

The original Sekhmet myth has Ra send Sekhmet as the incarnation of his vengeance/his eye to kill humans conspiring to destroy him, but then Sekhmet continues killing humans indiscriminately, at which point Ra dyes beer red to make it look like blood and gets Sekhmet blackout drunk, and when she wakes up she's not interested in killing anymore.

So I think that the healers of Healer Valley would have done nothing wrong, based on the source material used.

1 hour ago, Joerg said:

Personally, I find the Elmal/Yelmalio "schism" or disagreements minor compared to the mix-up of Antirius and Reladivus/Kargzant (and whatever the world may have fogotten about Yamsur). The Bridling of Kargzant in the Dawn Age is a merger enforcing some sort of identity that wasn't there to begin with, creating a hybrid Lightfore. (Almost like a centaur - part man, part horse.) 

There's such a web of Sun Jr. entities- beyond the ones we've discussed, we've also got Yelorna, Sun Daughter, Halamalao, Metsyla, I believe there's an East Isles one, and who knows what's up with Galanin... I think you're just forced to, at some level, invent your own jigsaw pieces to make it all work. Or, alternately, insist the jigsaw pieces are actually all just the same piece...

1 hour ago, radmonger said:

On Earth, all matters Gloranthan are equally ineffable. We have no reliable way of knowing the truth of any of them.

However, in Glorantha itself, this is not so; some things are thoroughly effable. The current location of Boldhome is in a different category from the current location of Brithos.

Similarly, it is never going to be a deep and unanswerable mystery to any inhabitant of Dragon Pass whether Yelmalio and Elmal are the same or not; it will likely be a matter of the personal lived experience of someone they know.

So to me, it is a mistake to obfuscate the presentation of Glorantha to create artificial mysteries or controversies that can't exist in the setting. Like 'now it is 1627, who is the current prince of Sartar? What is their personality and reputation?'

Save that for the stuff Gloranthan's actually disagree about, like who was Arkat. Or 'who should we worship'?

 

Glorantha isn't real. When you say that "it is never going to be a deep and unanswerable mystery to any inhabitant of Dragon Pass whether Yelmalio and Elmal are the same or not", I can say that it is, and I have interviewed over 4000 Orlanthis as evidence, and we are both on the exact same ground- we are talking about something that is, in conventional definitions, unknowable, because it concerns something that is definitionally untrue.

We can talk about the contents of a given book or online essay or whatever and know things in those contents because those contents are a matter of truth, but there is no statement either way on that matter- even the revelation of the Many Suns appears to be a moment of mystical insight rather than a matter of reasoned argumentation, which might well suggest that it is a deep mystery that, within the imagined fictional universe we conjure up, cannot be approached rationally. Or maybe nobody noticed it until Monrogh had a snakes-biting-their-own-tails moment and figured out the structure of benzene.

Now, having said all that, what I am pointing to is not whether there is any such disagreement or not. The Greg Stafford quote is instead about how there are two (plus) ways of making Gloranthas, one where the Elmal material of King of Sartar is used and one where it isn't, and that these are both equally true. That is, there are multiple Gloranthas in which each one may or may not have any disputation about this status or not. That's the key factor here- at that unenlightened stage, there was no singular true Glorantha, there were many Gloranthas. There was nothing, to Stafford, higher than that which was produced through play, at that time.

8 minutes ago, Richard S. said:

No one's trying to change your Glorantha. Official publications do have a canon though, and that's primarily what this board is for discussing. Has that canon changed? Yes. Do you have to change your own? No. Play with the old material if you want, and edit the new to suit your campaign. YGMV remains.

What on Earth are you talking about? 

3 hours ago, Ironwall said:

I'm not going to lie I usually find the bolo lizard floggings to be entertaining and informative 

Welcome to the "weird corner", then! On that weird end of things, of course, we have the thirty-year-old essay on Elmal:

"I am not dismayed by disagreements since then. (I am dismayed, instead, by people’s hurt over this change.) I am glad that the Yelmalions insist that their god, Yelmalio, is ancient with history stretching from before the Dragonkill War. They insist that we brought back Elmal by our heroquesting.

I expect them to swear by this, and to proffer artifacts and tales to prove that it is Yelmalio who was the original sun god for us. To them Monro, perhaps the most honorable man I have ever met, preserved the original form of our Godtime worship and maneuvered to remove the last of his True Believers from among our corrupting influence. I do not disagree with this, and am proud of my little part in liberating them from us."

Or to put it another way, in 1993, Francis Gregory Stafford seemed to believe in some kind of compatibilist vision- the Gloranthas without Elmal and those with Elmal were in some sense equally "true", equally grammatical statements in the Glorantha-language. I am sure he recanted this later, and revealed that there was, in truth, a true Glorantha that mere mortal players varied from in their weakness, rather than the disturbing grim vision of Glorantha as a series of objects constructed by playing games. 

But in the weakness of compatibilist anarchy, a deeper trap lies- if the "discoverer" could be wrong- why should we give his words and thoughts particular credence? The hierarchy of source credibility, the vision of the holy canon assembled, trembles like a house of cards. Elmal is only the beginning- look into the origins of Caladra and Aurelion, and you might well go blind. Look long upon Balazar, and you might begin to hear a shrill whistling at the edge of perception. 

What was I talking about again?