Sir_Godspeed

I was considering whether we were to assume that Luxites and Celestial Deities, as well as the original inhabitants of the Decapolis lay eggs. O:o Nysalor was hatched from an egg though, interestingly enough. Now I'm wondering whether we should imagine Murharzam with a downy head of feathers.

Not sure if "we all know", with the God Learner maps introducing forests as an alien encroachement that didn't seem to reach all parts of the world. Of course, they might be dead wrong, or "forests" might mean something beyond just tree-coverage. Well, these are problems for ordinary lumbering as well, for carpentry purposes - and they clearly manage somehow, so there's clearly a way around it.

Don't the Dara Happans or Orlanthi believe that Umath wasn't so much killed as he was maimed and forever chained?

Love the horses. Can't wait to see what all this'll come together to. Thank you for sharing.

I assumed it was intentionally small in order to act as a teaser, since all the previous images were removed.

Wow, beautiful stuff! Just read through this thread, and I don't have much to add except - could Eorl be a synonym for Dar (the Orlanthi term for a tribal chieftain/king?)

I totally see how it's a nightmare for DMs and authors, and how it makes the universe more dense and opaque to newcomers - but on the other hand, trying to shove everything into a neatly mutually-non-exclusive pattern isn't necessarily the goal either. I know people disagree on the larger, underlying ontology of the God Time, but there is at the very least a decent argument to be made for that the God Time was an existence where multiple events could be true and untrue at once, and so looking back at it as if though it should all fit into one objectively true (however nuanced and sprawling) narrative is forever doomed to fail. I'm not sure who wrote it, but to paraphrase something that stuck with me: "So in the Compromise, which myths will be true? All of them." I say this, of course, as someone who is always looking to connect puzzle pieces and make things fit together. But I try and carry two truths in my head at once when it comes to God-Time "multiveracity", as it were.

It was trying to prove that Entekos was Dendara. It didn't quite manage that (although it did show Entekos had the title of "the Dendara", iirc, literally meaning "the Virtuous"). This perspective has since been accepted in some Dendaran temples, *I think*, the specifics are escaping me right now. There's some one-way-compatible rituals going on. Valare Addi did this after having tried to prove that Dendara was the Red Goddess - *I think*, also, which she was blinded for, so that's apparently way wrong. It seems that the Entekosias is a newer thesis.

Or they just burn it as fuel.

Well, I didn't mean it as a problem - but as someone who've entered Glorantha within the last few years, it's been a lot more clear to me who Shargash is than Tolat, and the impression's been that Tolat is primarily a Eastern/Southern deity, whereas Shargash is the one relevant for Central Genertelan issues. To see them conflated like that in print seemed to me to be surprising. In fact, I had no idea that Shargash was a newer character than Tolat... and of course, for other newcomers, it won't be relevant to the same degree either. Who knows, things might be different now with the Sourcebook out there.

Interesting point.

Thankfully not quite the levels of Zeus... as far as I know. O.o Jokes aside, I have my suspicions that most of the Air God-patriarchs have close affinities for horned herd animals (to the point of being identified as them), so Orlanth-as-the-Ram fathering a lamb or two is quite thematically consistent. More recent artwork shows him with ram's horns as well, sometimes. Urox is a bull of course, Ragnaglar might've been the billy goat, Varnaval might've been the Ordeed/Andam buck, and so on. There's also the story of Lokamaydon using his Giant Storm Ram mount to incarnate a new, syncretic god, Tarumath. Heler is of course associated with the Ram, but that seems more to do with their woolen fleece looking like rain clouds rather than the horns. Horns might be replaced with tusks, it seems, as in the case of whichever god is locally associated with hogs (Entru as the patriarch of the Entruli, Entra as the Sow Mother, or a temporally-displaced Barntar as the Companion of the Great Pig during the Descent). No word of whether Vadrus ever appearing in the guise of some sexually-dimorphic herd mammal. My bet is that if that was ever the case, it must've been mean and extinct. That's more of a topic for a different thread though - like my para-Orlanthi one.

I would just like to say that both @David Scott and @Joerg brought up several points that made Waha as an Orlanthi deity (more specifically, a Heortling one, since that's the Orlanthi group I tend to default to mentally) a lot more nuanced than I first thought. I still think your average rural carl would associate butchering more with Barntar or Durev, as every-man-gods, but the perspective of the average joe and the learned will probably be different, as will possibly the professional urban butcher. And Hendrikiland has been in contact with Prax since the early Dawn, much moreso than Talastar, Ralios or Fronela. EDIT: Glad to be of use, @Darius West! It's fun speculation, especially when it leads to more knowledge.

Well, it was just my personal impression - a connection to the Andins make some sense too (although I'll freely admit I thought THEY were a group of trolls initially too. I guess I had a tendency to associate most warlike humanoid "demons" with trolls in some sense.). Now, one thing I noticed while reading through this thread is that there is a great deal of argument on whether Shargash and Tolat can be comfortably conflated. That is to say, they do appear to conceptually be based on some common core, but are presented very differently in terms of imagery and worship. One major element is that Tolat seemingly has no connection to the underworld (unless you see his erotic aspects as a kind of cthonic male virility... Not of the Earth, but rather deeper, from the Underworld. A kind of Osiris-phallus kind of deal, which only spring to mind since I mentioned it in another thread the other day). Shargash, on his side, doesn't seem to have any explicit tie to the moons aside from being a fellow celestial deity (afaik). All that aside (and if this forum has taught me anything, it's that I've missed a ton of points), how do you guys feel about Shargash EXPLICITLY being named Tolat in the Glorantha Sourcebook? It made my eyes widen a bit, since it was so... syncretic. On the one hand Tolat is definitely an outlier name in that otherwise heavily Pelorian version of the Sky panteon, on the other, Tolat is the more widely known figure. More to the point: does it make sense to make them explicitly synonymous like this? It reminds me of the older material, where Balumbasta and Veskarthen/Caladra are just straight up called Lodril. I realize it's not a huge deal, but just thought it was interesting, and kind of a bold move on the part of the writers.

New Pavis, to my knowledge, is such a metropolitan affair, that it brings a number of different concerns to fore compared to my earlier post, which was based more on traditional Heortling ideas, mostly (or Entruli, etc., you get the deal). The above all sounds fine to me, but clearly I'm not too well-versed in this.

You can totally polish a turd, the Mythbusters did it! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiJ9fy1qSFI Not sure how to preserve the cubic shape, though.

That's... both awfully convenient (no need to involve yet more names and identities, which strikes me as a bit artificial-feeling) and weirdly contrived (So did the Orlanthi just not have a butcher deity before the Dawn? How did they import him? I don't see the importance of him being related to Orlanth via Storm Bull either, really. Vingkot is the nephew of Storm Bull, but he doesn't have any significance to the Praxians, from what I know. I don't know, it just doesn't quite sit right by me. Give it a few weeks, maybe, and I might get used to the idea.

Well, it might have been a thread ressurection from a while ago, but it made for very interesting reading. I've also been somewhat interested by how Shargash is an endemic Pelorian deity, but Tolat seems to be lozengally known. In terms of Shargash changing, how does one put together that Shargash and Umath fought violently and seemingly brutally in the Sky prior to their fall, and that later on Shargash put together a seemingly "civilized" war party of drummers and hornblowers? You'd think it was the crash into the Underworld that actually changed him, and not some arbitrary point later on. Unless my memory of GRoY is incorrect, and Oslira invaded before Umath existed... but that seems very wrong to me. The bias of the myths authors should also be taken into account. Plentonius might've had some motivation to present Shargash in the way he did - possibly to ridicule him and show the superiority of Murahrzam - but also possibly to show him as civilized? I don't know. A bit of a side-note, but I always just assumed that "Shadzor" was a garbled pronounciation of "Shargash", and that the Shadzorings were Shargashi berserkers risen to some kind of rulership position, and by extension gone kinda nuts, with the lack of an emperor, or just due to the insanely hostile conditions of the Greater Darkness in general. I considered whether the Greater Darkness-era cult of Shargash's berserkers might've also allowed the induction of trolls, both for practical concerns and due to some kind of realization of Shargash's partly darkness- aligned nature/parentage. Later Dara Happa would obviously have covered up any troll presence if there actually was one, much as they tried retconning the identity of the Hyalorings. I didn't actually think the Shadzorings were a different race of beings until I read threads about it here. Still not sure how I feel about that. Somehow the idea of humans (or humans-and-trolls) gone so bloodthirsty that even the Vingkotlings saw them as demons seem more interesting to me than another race of literal demons. Eh, oh well.

Is Waha even a figure in Orlanthi mythology? I always thought of specifically as a Praxian Culture Hero, much like Heort to the Heortlings.

Hah, you sound like my anthropology professors now. 😄 But yes, exactly. More concretely, it was one of the first times I was introduced to the idea of a complex look into a pre-Golden Age world. The Malkioni, Theyalan and Draconic views on that period are so abstracted or vague that not a lot of things can be said, imho, but in the Entekosiad we have lots of stories of named individuals going around and doing things, and not necessarily in an outright paradisical situation as well, making it somewhat nuanced. Lots of food for thought.

Yeah, the Entekosiad was definitely an eye-opener for me too. I'd previously read the King of Sartar, both the volumes of the Guide, the GRoY, and browsed the wiki extensively, and I thought I had things sorta figured out to an extent. Then Valare Addi hits me with a massive load of "you know nothing, Jon Snow." Later on, when reading Revealed Mythologies, this new perspective has only been strengthened, although I don't think even Pamaltelan or Vithelan myths feel quite as radical to me now as Pelandan myths did back then. That's probably why I like them so much.

That could make for an interesting myth. Durev, or whoever, visiting Lhankor Mhy to see how he's doing, finding out he's struggling with carving things into wood or stone, and then together they somehow invent parchment. Could become a heroquest where they have to get the permission from one of the Animal Mothers or Ernalda, maybe by driving off some foe, or solving a riddle. Actually, that could be quite fun. A challenge based on wisdom and knowledge paired with practical knowhow and manual ingenuity. EDIT: Or one of Durev's many sons, as you mentioned above. Heck, "Durev's sons" could be a kenning for all the different crafts a good Carl should learn in their lifetime. Extrapolate that to an urban environment with artisanal specialization, and turn those allegorical entities into actual gods, and voila, you have Durev Durevsson the Tanner, Durev Durevsson the Joiner, the Brickmaker, etc. etc. It also parallels Lodril's "Ten sons and ten servants", which seems to be based on the same logic of one "everyman god" being the father/master of specialized laborer/craftsmen gods.

Isn't there something about how they can eat air, but only absolutely in the direst circumstance, since it doesn't feel filling in any degree? I might've dreamt that up after looking through some excerpts from Trollpak. I also seem to remember that they're not too fond of eating excrement.

Tanning is such a specialized, yet widely used profession or activity that it does seem like it could have its own deity. I tried looking up the Descent from the Mountain myth, to see if there were some deity that was associated as a keeper of Uralda, or even Urox, but no such luck there. I guess I might've jumped the gun by going straight for cattle hide since other hides can be tanned as well, but with the Heortlings, at least, so obsessed with cattle, it just seemed prudent. Anyway, I could see a few options: 1) there is no particular deity associated with tanning and leatherwork. 2) It's associated with an Animal Mother or Ernalda as personifications of the animals themselves and the boons they bring. 3) It's associated with some variant of Voriof as the god of herders (imo, unlikely, given his youthful status) 4) It's associated with Orlanth is some manner, a generic male practice. Fine, but boring. 5) It's associated with Durev, as the Great Carl, the builder of houses, carver of wood, etc. This in my opinion seems a fairly good angle. In fact, he does lend himself as a patron to a lot of crafts. 6) It's associated with Barntar as a handler of animals, especially cattle before the plow. Also fine, imho, just a tad more of an abstraction. Of course, all of these could be true depending on which region we're talking about.

The word sphinx literally means "strangler" in Greek, but we don't really know what the Egyptians called them, so that might no be a very important aspect. Point is, the Greeks seems to have seen them as monsters, whereas the Egyptian ones carried the faces of deceased Pharaos and so were almost certainly seen as protectors or at the very least boons of some kind. Perhaps allegorical for their vigilance and protection of the Two Kingdoms from beyond the grave. The hieracosphinx is interesting in that it is visually identical to the concept of an "alce", that is to say, they both look like wingless griffins (leonine body, aquiline head). Some of the oldest portrayals of these also exist in the Minoan culture - another extremely old urban culture, which in Glorantha is closely tired to Esrolia in particular, and pre-Dawn Earth Cultures in general. I'm interested in their relation to Anatolian "Sphinxes" as well, although I don't know much more about them than that they apparently exist in some artwork. We also have the Mesopotamian lamassu and shedu, which similarly have a human head with an animal body. In this case, it's more famously a bull's body, but they have lion bodies as well. Again, they seem to be associated with protection, being featured on gates. These also sometimes have wings, which adds to the complexity of what they would signify within the Gloranthan elemental-mythic lattice. And of course Mesopotamia is closely associated with Dara Happa in Glorantha, aesthetically if nothing else.