Jump to content

Qizilbashwoman

Member
  • Posts

    1,892
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    25

Everything posted by Qizilbashwoman

  1. The other thing is that "shamanism" is kind a wildly open term, but I am not going to try to unpack that here (I did religion studies at harvard div)
  2. can an ancient person not just do drugs without being labeled a shaman? The Yanomamo took hallucinogenic drugs every afternoon because they liked it.
  3. scotty, how did your storm bulls get along with the lunars? i'm interested in this.
  4. if you live in america you've probably seen a lot of these
  5. this one has had good reviews (unlike any other D&D film ever made)
  6. the best comment i've seen about the new D&D Movie so far is someone asking what game system they should use to run an adventure in it, hahaha
  7. nobody reads the argonautika. barely anyone knows the Classics, at least in North America.
  8. Side note: we all know about the Mechanical Turk, but did you know Buddhist stories from its earliest era discuss automata/robots multiple times? The Buddha's tomb was protected by an army of grieving robots according to the earliest Buddhist narratives, and at Harvard, I read a Tocharian translation of an equally ancient story of a court automaton that was so lifelike that a courtier fell in love with it. This is what we call the "Tiffany problem": there should be robots in Glorantha, because Bronze Age stories already knew about robots and told many stories about them, but like the name "Tiffany", if you add them, people think it's a weirdly out-of-place decision. (Tiffany is a perfectly cromulent medieval name but it "sounds"like it was invented in 1980!)
  9. fig wine as well, which might be even easier to make than palm wine because figs start to ferment if unharvested on their own
  10. yeah, "eating the rich to achieve leftism" is technically one step but like, traditionally that's viewed as "a communist revolution" and frowned upon
  11. I'd like to add that a very traditional spice is Levantine za'atar. It's made of oregano, marjoram or thyme; toasted spices like cumin and coriander, with sesame seeds, salt and sumac. This blend dates back to the Pharaonic age!
  12. An overview of tribal pastoralist lifestyles in general: meat is more common than in cities, but protein is largely fish, eggs, mushrooms, and pemmican equivalents (dried fruits and meats pounded together for storage, a kind of portable sausage with high caloric, protein, and vitamin values). If you eat non-supermarket diets, or are older, you'll be aware of seasonality: you eat vegetables and fruits by season, and that means a lot of cabbage all winter (because it grows in the cold). While the exact climate of Sartar is not entirely known, we do know it is not Europe, but rather more like West Asia. There's snow and cold in the mountains but relatively warm but very dry weather in fall; winter (Dark to Storm) is cold and rainy. Cabbage grows in the cold, but still you are mostly eating stored foods. Food preservation is crucial: cold storehouses for meat, fruits and berries, and grain storage is largely in things like little watchtowers: these are protected from vermin entry with tall legs with rodent-blocking rings (like rat guards on ship lines) and removable ladders. Access to seasonal meats is great! Chicken, pig (for places by water), cattle, and small cattle (camelids, caprids, sheep, antelope, etc.). Cattle and pigs are slaughtered in the Dark Season (November/Dec), after autumn has ended. Caprid and sheep slaughter I'm less sure about, but sheep in particular are primarily sources of wool and are only killed when they are old. Animals are raised for offerings and are shared by various cult communities after sacrifice. Bread is made from a multitude of grains, but also from nuts and seeds, including acorns. As for spices, these are grown in gardens and bought at markets from specialists and very valued. Western European foods now are infamously bland largely because rather recently, spiced food was seen as "common" and "real connoisseurs" would just boil the chicken, but early modern, medieval, and earlier cookbooks attest to the value of very good spicing. If you want some more inspiration, just remember that traditional Irish foods were originally like Indian foods, the only difference being the kind of spices to hand. (Chiles are a post-Columbian arrival.) Dairy products like yogurts and farmer cheese, flatbreads, prepared meats, chutneys, and sauces resembling curries. These foods were entirely destroyed by colonialism. (The Irish also ate a ton of seaweed, which is still present in some very rural places.)
  13. By the way, if anyone is interested in the details of incantation bowls, this lecture is amazing:
  14. which makes me wonder about Yinkin bounty hunters
  15. i mean, as an american most of my friends are concerned more with the immediate reality of survival. 60% of americans live month-to-month!
  16. One of my favorite Mesopotamian religious practices from late antiquity are called incantation bowls, which were written in the varieties of Aramaic that were spoken in Mesopotamia. They appear in great numberas demon-trapping devices (for illness and bad mazzal "star sign" - yes, mazl tov basically means "may the stars align" and Ladino malmazal means "bad star sign!") and have all kinds of cross-religious symbols, showing that phrases about Jesus or from the Mishna of Judaism or from Mandaeaism or Manichaeism were used apotropaically (symbolically). They were seemingly created by some kind of religious specialist; you had a problem you asked your local religious person who knew how to work the magic to catch a demon for you. These are, simply put, demon traps. We've found them in situ: a trap is on the bottom and a second bowl is over it and sealed and the entire device buried. Images of the mallian spirit (lilin) are generally painted in the center, and the practice was made to snare a potential child-killing spirit, migraine demon, plague monster, or curse spirit to protect an individual suffering. In Nippur, excavations have shown that every single Sasanian Jewish residence before Islam had a full trap buried in it, suggesting it represented a kind of preemptive charm when housebuilding, an extraordinarily common practice in cultures across the world. This image is in Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, and Jewish bowls have quotes from the Torah and from commentaries and rabbis. I don't know what this one says, it might be the common Jewish demon Lilith or the Persian one called Bagdana This one is in Mandaic Aramaic, the language of the Mandaeans, an now-endangered religious community. It notably is non-representational.
  17. Sabanabelagola ("white pond of the renunciate") is one of the greatest Jain pilgrimmage sites (tirthas) in the world, built possibly as early as the reign of Ashoka (third century BCE). Tirthas are generally on mountaintops and have incredible stone-cut architecture: For the uninitiated, Jainism is like... nonviolent extremist Buddhism? It isn't Buddhism but it is similar, but believes that there is an eternal self that is tarnished by violence and only rather extreme forms of self-deprivation can purify sins. Jains are somewhat famous in that one of its schools has naked renunciates, the "skyclad". Jains are an amazing community, incidentally. One of my favorite books on Jainism is called Framing the Jina, https://www.amazon.com/Framing-Jina-Narratives-Icons-History/dp/0195385020/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gommateshwara_statue#/media/File:Gommateshwara,_Shravanabelagola.jpg This is a statue known as the Gommatessara, representing the, uh, I guess you'd say "saint", Bahubali, built in the tenth century Jain tirthas are exquisite: here's a representational map (i.e. not a scale map) of several of them known as a tirtha pata. Just viewing a tirtha pata is said to remove sin from the soul.
  18. I'd like to make a list of good real-world inspirations we can use for Glorantha. Here's an article called Drums, Hearts, Bulls, and Dead Gods: The Theology of the Ancient Mesopotamian Kettledrum. I'd like to recommend this for Storm Bull worship! https://www.academia.edu/37304751/Drums_Hearts_Bulls_and_Dead_Gods_The_Theology_of_the_Ancient_Mesopotamian_Kettledrum?email_work_card=title
  19. i always thought the most dangerous sort of Broo is the Mallian witch born from herd men. They pass as human, are outcaste for being female, and thus are likely to be an actual "third column" threat for settled places in Prax (imagine the cursed Oases; imagine a Mallian in Pavis).
  20. i do really think it is going to be worlds different to be an Ulerian priest in Esrolia versus pre-Lunar Dara Happa, or Solar Dara Happa versus Pentans.
  21. man, what is this, exalted? /jk
  22. i'd like to make a note here that if a hetaira has sex with someone, it's because she wants to, not because she's paid. her major attraction is that in highly sex-segregated societies, such as ancient Greece and modern Japan ("modern" here meaning the era from about 1500 until 1945), the ability to have an emotional and intellectual connection with women was highly valued. also, the ancient "sacred priestesses" as providing sex is not true. modern scholars do not believe it actually happened. in fact, these individuals had extraordinary rights under the laws of their societies. what does this mean for Uleria? well, your glorantha will vary, but it's going to vary from society to society. Certainly Uleria in settled Solar societies like our Yelmic friends would have been a courtesan, but what that means for tribal societies or for Pavis proper I sincerely do not know since sex segregation essentially doesn't exist. So who is Dendera and Uleria to Yelm in pre-lunar times? The chaste wife versus the companion.
×
×
  • Create New...