Sir_Godspeed

So, I've done my due diligence (hopefully) in reading through the Chern Durel section in the Guide again (I'd forgotten a lot, but in fairness it doesn't necessarily explain a whole lot either - bird's eye view of the Guide and all that). What I'm getting is that Chen Durel was at one point in the Golden Age a Solar civilization, clearly at least partly urban, although I'm unsure whether it was actually united politically or just shared a common culture. The culture has some stereotypical mezoamerican touchstones, such as stepped pyramids and human sacrifice, but the human sacrifice is explained to be an innovation at some point, not necessarily originally there (you'll have to forgive me for being confused by the name Jorazzi Redhands - it sounds so incredibly like the names we get with the Orlanthi that I begun questioning whether this was some Orlanthi adventurer in time or something - but he appears to be local to the region.). I still have some questions about this stuff, and hopefully they are more articulated this time around: 1. They're a Solar civilization. This is interesting since so are their immediate neighbors to the east of pre-Flood Vithela (including pre-Kralorela which is not yet Draconic at this point) as well as their eventual western neighbors in God Time Peloria/Empire of Brilliance. Moreover, they have stepped pyramids, which conjures images of Dara Happa. While the ziggurats of Dara Happa are quite lanky, the stepped pyramids of Chen Durel are almost always explicitly stated to be squat, still, an interesting parallel. Additionally, and apochryphal, Six Ages features Dara Happans emerging from under the Glacier in the Storm Age who are illustrated with very clearly Mezo- or South American clothing and even physical features (see here). In many ways, Chen Durel is located between the Solar Empire/Empire of Brilliance/Dara Happa, and the eastern solar empire, Vithela/Abzered. Do we consider the Ignorants - at this point still in the Golden Age - to have been associated, or under either of them? I know that the question is essentially unanswereable since mythic politics is so malleable and loose (ie. if Vith is associated with Aether Primolt, and Yelm with Govermanen, we essentially have two different Solar Imperial Complexes, on either side of the Ignorants, perhaps minus some Genert's Garden butting in a bit along the west. Anyway, this direct association while always difficult, is super interesting to me). 2. They have a prophecy. This is deeply interesting to me since prophecies are generally somewhat rare in Glorantha, but moreover they seem to have been more forewarned than other Solar civilizations of the Golden Age. This makes them kinda special, doesn't it? The question is also - why did they start assuming that the sun would change? Others here have argued elsewhere that the Sun or Yelm is an office taken over by god after god. Could this be another perspective on that? We're in deep foil hat territory, obviously. 3. The different Suns are, initially, associated with the phases of the sun's path across the sky. Early Light (Dawn), Rising Orb, Victorious Zenith and Solar Storm. You know what's bizarre about that? The sun did not move in the Golden Age. So this leaves me with some thoughts: Either a) they were actually remembering something from the Green Age when it's possible that the Sun in fact moved around the sky along with a white moon and other celestial objects, b) it's a set of metaphors for imperial-divine power of the Sun in the Golden Age that are weirdly prescient of what is to come, c) it's a part of a grand perspective of the entire God Time from Blue Age, to Green Age, to Gold Age, to Storm Age - the later suns provide for the Greater Darkness, and this pattern is then at least partially reproduced and "fixed" for the Sun's path within Time (clearly very validating to whoever was left worshipping sun in Chen Durel at the Dawn). It's also possible it was all composed in retrospect, which is a nice nod to RW religious practices, but feels a bit cheap, worldbuilding-wise. 4. The four different suns so far: can they comfortably be associated with Pelorian sun Gods, or Vithelan Sun/Ruler gods? Ather or Vith as Early Light or Rising Orb? Yelm or Govmeranen as Victorious Zenith? Shargash or Tolat as Solar Storm? I know other mentioned this earlier, but I'm trying to formulate some thoughts of my own before I mix with others' perspectives. 5. At some point human sacrifice started. This summoned an aspect of the Suns called the Blood Sun. The Blood Sun is actually not its own phase of the lineage of the Sun gods as I previously thought, it's apparently an aspect of all suns. @metcalph quoted earlier that initially the sacrificed would return to life (ie. Golden Age), but then stop to do so (ie. Storm Age, post innovation of Death). The parallels to human sacrifice of the kings in the Entekosiad is interesting, but perhaps not directly related, since the sacrifice of the Red King (iirc) is a Green Age tradition, whereas the Chen Durel is a Golden Age innovation. I am interested in knowing why the Ignorants thought they needed to increase the strength of their sun god during the Golden Age though. Storm Age I could understand (things are getting dicey), but paradisical (if totalitarian) Golden Age? There seems to be something we're not privy to here. Strengthening against the Seas, maybe? Internal divisions? Morevoer, the Guide puts the paragraph about Redhands' innovation after paragraphs of Solar Storm's reign ending, which at least structurally gives the impression that the human sacrifice thing happened during the Storm Age. This makes more sense with regards to the need to strengthen the sun, but not so much when taken together with the above quote on how sacrifices would initially return to life just fine. This might just be an artifact of text formatting though, and not actually the text's intention. I'm not sure. 6. Solar Storm is said to have been given a third eye and turned placid and enlightened. Does this mean that Shargash or Tolat has Illuminated aspects, or illumination myths? This was done by Emperor Shavaya, which is apparently late Storm Age, so that checks out at least. EDIT: This is assuming that Solar Storm can even be associated with the Red Planet, which is arguable to begin with, I don't rightly know either way. 7. And so the trolls arrive. They are preceded by a prophet called Shadow of the Storm. It is at this point that we get the prophecy of the Suns to Come, which means that I was wrong in thinking that the Suns to Come had to do with the Early Light, Rising Orb, etc. The prophecy of the Suns to Come relates to EVEN MORE Suns. Shadow of the Storm claims that the Black Sun is the (or one of the) prophesized Suns to Come. It is explicitly called a black or dark fire, which makes my mind go to Zorak Zoran - but even here Shargash is not entirely off the table. And then there is Bijiif, Yelm's underworld aspect. Kazkurtum is similarly a term which could be applied to aspects of Bijiif or Shargash (but perhaps less so ZZ) and even Chaos. I believe the actual, local name used for the Black Sun is Basko, and they are consistently differentiated from ZZ in the Guide, and moreover stated to "ostensibly be of the Sky pantheon". 8. And then... at the tail end of the First Age, this craziness all just sort of... ends? Okay, well, not really, there's more to Chen Durel, but from then to at least the Hero Wars, the native multi-Sun, Black Sun cult and mythos is supressed by Kralorelan draconic ministers and governors. The troll ruling class is largely purged or pacified. The local commoners and traditional priesthoods continue more or less as usual, but with the imperial might of a (beleaguered) essentially "colonial" Kralorelan government on top. There's a brief interlude during the New Dragon ring, but it doesn't strike me as immediately relevant to our discussion here. So, that sums up my understanding this far. Do people have some thoughts about this stuff? Some corrections, some help or just a desire to spin on a fun yarn together? I also acknowledge that the usage of strict "Ages" in the God Time is artificially constrained, but I needed some level of framework around which to base my thoughts, or else it would just turn to soup, so feel free to poke holes in that if you want to. EDIT: Damn it, I forgot to include the stuff from Revealed Mythologies about the Sky Tyrant and Herespur and such, but I don't quite have time to do that before tonight. Input greatly appreciated.

My knowledge of Glorantha is skewed in an unusual way since I'm not really a tabletop roleplayer, so I don't really have any RQ or HQ material. My view into Glorantha is largely literary and due to my fascination with worldbuilding and anthropology. I know of Helespur from Revealed Mythologies, which to the best of my knowledge, does not mention the Ignorants in any signicant capacity. I'm working on assembling a complete collection of the Stafford Library, but there's a limited amount of money I can spend on stuff atm (recently unemployed looking for work). I've got a few of those, plus the Sourcebook, and I do in fact have the Guide! I bought it in 2017 back before I went off to India for studies, to have some interesting to read. Anyway, I had to find and boot up my old PC to retrieve the PDF, so now it's with me and available for reference again! (I guess it's possible to download the document from Chaosium again if you need it - I admit I've never tried to do so.) So, I'll take @metcalph's initial advice and re-read the passage on Chen Durel in the Guide, and then make a new post with hopefully more informed question.

I apologize if I'm coming off as rude - that was not the intention. I am not being facetious, I have very little understanding of what these references are.

Who? The ignorants? Which god? When? What? The what now? As you can see, I am totally blanking on this. EDIT: Basically all I know is that Bliss in Ignorance used to be populated by a culture of humans who worshipped the Sun(?), but at some point started mass sacrifice from stepped pyramids (subtle). Then something bad happened, and we get a succession - or prophesized succession? - of different Suns, and something about a war in heaven (or am I crossing wires now?) and then there are some trolls moving in who either conquer and take over with some Darkness Sun or something, and then something about trollkin and humans and Kralori and oh dear I appear to have gone crosseyed. So feel free to treat me as if I'm a newborn babe on this one.

This is something I'm quite ignorant of (heh). I'm getting the general vibes that it's about an alternate perception of the God Time many suns stuff, and I think there's something parallel to the Vithelan myths of the demon who takes over heaven (Helespur?) and maybe Shargash is related to the Blood or Black Sun or something, but overall I don't really understand it. Both explanation and reading suggestions would be much appreciated.

Ezkankekko's role in the Greater Darkness and Gray/Dawn Age almost cannot be overstated. He's in command of pretty much the only stable polity left, and his agents, through the shadow tribute (aka the equal exchange) facilitate the survival of many other groups. He also commands the most effective anti-Chaos fighting forces there, and is of course an incredibly powerful magician with a legitimate genealogical claim to overlordship of the land (being a son of Esrola the Earth). He is bar none, afaik, the main leadership figure in the region. There's a reason why the region of Kethaela in this time, and even in the second and early third age is called the Shadowlands. But you're absolutely right - Heortling-biased sources (which is what we usually see in game supplements) tends to deemphasize his role for that of Heort or other heroes. Esrolians are more open about OOO's preeminence though. EDIT: This is my impression at least.

I still think it's less a case of multiple sources and more a case of multiple perspectives on the same source. THe GaGoG has a theistic slant, and a God Learner/Esrolian Knowledge Temple one as well, so it makes sense to emphasise the genealogical perspective. Are the Jaskali dino-Hsunchen descended from escaped slaves of the Mostali or am I imagining that?

This is also why communal performance and recital of these myths is so important - creating common references on which society is built. Common experiences, often bodily, that solidify otherwise abstract relations. The practical importance of myths is probably also why people like the Lightbringers and Lunars and God Learners were so succesful: they provided myths that helped explain new things, and make sense of this widening of the horizon. The Lightbringer cycle, and the harmonization/adjustment of Dara Happan and Theyalan mythologies weren't simply important because they "set the record straight" from an historian's point of view, but because they allowed the guy in the street to actually communicate and speak with - or be pissed at - those others, imho. You might disagree on which gods were the right ones to follow, but at least you both sorta understood where the other were coming from. That wasn't possible prior to the Unity Council, I'd argue. Doesn't always work, but for many it clearly does.

I think my point is that within an emic framework, it's not really the job of the various myths to be coherent across narratives - each narrative is a story unto itself, and serves a purpose of making sense of some part of existence or the human condition. This doesn't mean that they all neatly crossover into - for lack of a better term - an Expanded Universe. Most RW cultures do not have any equivalences of, say, the Bible or the Tripitaka (and even these - pruned and well-gardened and editorialized as they are, are not wholly internally consistent). Double-checking consistency across different stories isn't a massive concern, partly because you're usually not expected to know all of them by letter, and partly because there is an underlying understanding that the literal understanding is only part of it. Most mythologies work more along the lines of people having a stock set of characters which they put into different explanatory narratives. The general jist sort of fits, but the details don't have to. Hence the common emphasis on how "this happened long ago", etc. found in many narratives. I agree that many people restricted to their emic worldview probably see these stories as roughly consistent with each other, but I also think that they do so partly without necesarrily caring too much about the nitty gritty, and also, as mentioned above, that these stories are less important as straightforward narratives of the past, and more important for what they achieve in the here and now - ie. serve as legitimizers for power structures, moral lessons for children, explanation models for natural phenomena, public entertainment, gathering symbols, comfort in pain, etc. This is why consistency is not that big of a concern for most mythologies. They aren't *really* about the past. They're about the present.

I'm not even sure if I believe that. I'm not sure if myth is ever even MEANT to be coherent. If anything, the consistency is the product of exercising control over myth, whereas inconsistency is a result of exploring it freely. YGWV, obviously.

I agree that heroquesters can and have messed with the God Time (wether one phrases this as emphasizing and deemphasizing already existing narrative bonds or outright retconning narrative bonds is a bit academical) but I think the main reason for the internal inconsistencies of the God Time has less to do with this and more to do with that the God Time was never a single "timeline" and the fact that Gloranthans in Time are attempting to understand it like one grand narrative that appears in a sequential, linear and consistent narrative is a doomed project, because that's not how it worked. The God Time allowed for simultanous contradictory events to happen, and may have run several "cycles" simultaneously, allowing for the cause to come after the effect. Basically, not only the God Learners, but anyone attempting rigid and consistent sequentialization of the God Time were effectively trying to do the mythical equivalent of creating a flat map for a round globe, which as any cartographer will tell you, is bound to come with lots of issues. Just my $0.02.

This is really interesting, thanks for sharing!

I suppose, though the game makes it seem like it flows just sort of past Nivorah. I suppose it's possible Nivorah was located eastwards of where Jillaro is today - or even that the Arcos riverbed was further to the west. It's the God Time, stuff happens. It's very possible that keying into Reladivus is useful to establishing some rulership rituals/protections. I'm not so familiar with how this works for city gods or male mastery gods - I suppose the land sovereignty goddess model of sacred marriage doesn't quite work here - unless the male temporal ruler becomes a priest of the male mastery god and then enters either into a sacred marriage or in some way lays claim to God-Time-derived rulership. EDIT: Shargash/Alkor and the two goddesses they married comes to mind. A grain goddess and a river goddess, to be fair, but close enough in that they give legal claim to territorial control. Possibly this is also why the Dara Happan tripolis has remained so stable for several millennia, both pre- and post-Time. Not just the bonds of the Emperor, but the identification between the city god as both ruler and gestalt spirit of the community and its temporal ruler - but now I'm getting off track and getting a bit too general and wishy washy.

According to Six Ages, Reladivus is the son of Elmal, and specifically the city god of Nivorah. In this respect he is a lot like Alkor is to Shargash, imho, both a separate entity and a devolved specialized aspect. This is further complicated by, as mentioned above, the Dara Happan Empire apparently removing all mentions of Elmal from their records, and elevating Reladivus to the position of planetary god of Nivorah, which effectively makes him a kind of Little Sun as far as I'm concerned, although this is a *very* wide definition of "Little Sun" (by this definition Shargash is also a Little Sun, for instance - and while he is is a Planetary Deity, he is certainly not associated with Lightfore in any way that I know). This brings us to Time, I guess. I don't know Saird's history very well, but if old pre-Time traditions were taken up, I'd imagine them looking to Reladivus for certain celestial ideas, I guess. Overall I think the urban community aspect would be more important? (There is a weird thing about him taming Arcos, which I'm confused by, since I thought Nivorah was further west, but my knowledge here is patchy).

I've heard that too, I thought both were in the Guide.

I mean, I get it, but for a long time it seems that Elmal was not just intended to be the Orlanthi Lightfore god, but their god of the literal sun disk as well - at least that's the impression I get when I read Greg's "The Birth of Elmal - or why I screwed up your Glorantha". GRanted, I might be reading that incorrectly - and I know that a lot of development has happened over many years since then, but the point remains that for a lot of people, the associations of Elmal does not just go to Lightfore, but the daytime Sun Disk as well. But you almost assuredly know this, and I know this, and most people visiting this site probably know this, and I suspect we're all a bit tired of going through the motions of this debate over and over again. I respect the current direction of Chaousium. I don't really care if Elmal is retroactively losing some spells (I much more dislike Elmal's social and mythical marginalization, but that's a different issue), but I suppose others might. I don't think too much is going to be gained from having this discussion again.

I can't comment on the overall narrative. It is a fine one, as it appears to me, but I've no real horse in the race and neither the knowledge to evaluate against any thoughts of my own. One small thing I can comment on is that in Six Ages, the Hyalorings are shown as primarily cattle-ranchers. A few of the Hyaloring clans are Pure Horse people - much like with modern Pentans they are a minority, not the norm.

I think the diverging understandings here come from those who are influenced by previous texts, and those who are influenced by Six Ages. In Six Ages, Elmal is the City God/Planetary Son/Little Sun of Nivorah. The glacier overtaking this city turns its refugees into the Hyalorings (and another, charioteer, group who aren't terrible relevant right now). Due to their refusal to listen to imperial order to stay put under the glacier, the emperor essentially committed damnatio memoriae on Elmal, removing him from Dara Happan history and replacing him with his son, Reladivus, as the historically recorded city god of Nivorah. Yelmalio (literally called "Little Yelm" in the game) is explicitly a different deity. After the death of "the Emperor" in the past (from the Hyaloring perspective during the latter part of the Storm Age), many different gods claimed the position as keeper of the sunpath, amongst others Little Yelm, Shagash and others, and eventually the Hyalorings' Elma had to step in to safekeep it, essentially taking on the mantle of the Sun in the process. Inasmuch as there is a sun during the Storm Age, that is Elmal to the Hyalorings. During the course of the game itself, the player gets to attempt to form the beginnings of the Berennethtelli through intermarriage with a Vingkotling (called Rams in the game, from the Hyaloring perspective) group. That's the shortest summary I can give of it. I am fully aware that Six Ages is not "canon" in the strictest sense, ie. not published by Chaosium by whatever date/publication they currently hold as start of canon (presumably the Guide, but I'm unclear by now), but, well... it's a very well-made and compelling story, and to me and many others that does count for something as these things go. I don't have much else to add, just attempting to clear up what MIGHT be some talking past each other. If I didn't, please excuse me.

Another thing that's worth considering is that things that are "mundane" things in the RW are signs of spirits in Glorantha. Will-o-wisps, echoes, mirages, unexplained noices, sudden windshift. This means that they in a sense exceptional and "mundane" at the same time. My dad used to tell me that when the door opens or shuts by itself with no one touching it, it meant we were visited by "Evan Legless" ("Even Beinlaus"). As a young child I totally just bought that there was this invisible being who just came around every now and then, and it wasn't even threatening. Of course, it was really just the wind - but in Glorantha? Maybe a zephyr just playing around or saying hello to an Orlanthi stead, attracted by its inhabitants or a shrine or something.

Eating of children is a trait often associated with sows in folklore, at least as far as I know. Just to add to the whole pig cult complex around Dragon Pass (and likely elsewhere).

Totally understood, I feel exactly the same way. It's what made me take the leap into Glorantha (was only vaguely familiar with the name and something about the bronze age theme before), and I'd love to see it continued. I don't think anyone here sees your comment as a criticism of the people behind it, just enthusiasm for the work itself.

I love TexMex!

I wonder what the background for Kralorelan zombies are. Theistic means are certainly possible, but I can't help thinking that giving the Kralorelans some form of sorcery by way of Taoist-styled alchemy would be neat. And we've discussed elsewhere how it would be interesting if zombieness is seen as a sort of intentured servitude of the dead of indebted families or something.

You can probably look up a playthrough/Let's Play on youtube, they are quite common these days. If only to get the story/inspiration.

I might be misreading this, but my impression is that these things happen at least in part due to personal passion and drive from the (relatively small) stable of writers, so the author of the Eastern sourcebook might just have been going at it for a longer time/more focused or something. I might very well be wrong, but I doubt it's part of some overarching corporate mandate.