Chronoportation in the Godtime

[Joerg]

Godtime is cyclical, and yet Godtime entities are usually associated with a certain cycle to be their "home Age".

There are a number of glaring anachronisms, though.

Vingkot suffers an uncurable Chaos wound in the Battle of Stormfall, several generations after his immolation which he underwent to escape the torture of remaining alive with that pain.

Artmal aids Tolat in the Golden Age to overcome Umath before his mother's planet, his birthplace, has even been conceived, let alone risen. Veldara is conceived in Hell, by the dead sun god ("*Bijiif" in Revealed Mythologies) and Enjata Mo (black Dendara in Dara Happa, probably Kendamalar's wife in Doraddi and Artmali myth).

 

Valare Addi pioneers a heroquesting technique named Chronoportation which enables a quester to do such anachronistic insertions from far more recent myths. I wonder whether this turned up as a gift and/or a curse in the Godtime.

[scott-martin]

22 minutes ago, Joerg said:

Valare Addi pioneers a heroquesting technique named Chronoportation which enables a quester to do such anachronistic insertions from far more recent myths. I wonder whether this turned up as a gift and/or a curse in the Godtime.

Recent review of the work of William S Burroughs (especially "Ah Pook") leads me to suspect that the anachronisms are the shadows of heroquest vehicles projected on what would otherwise be a coherent mythic situation . . . something like changing lines in an I Ching hexagram. When we go back there we bring our present, the mythic "future," with us and sometimes we leave bits behind, unintentionally or otherwise.

And when we bring an encounter with them back from the Godtime it is like the fragmented experience we bring back when woken up out of a dream. The pieces just don't fit back together in any kind of logical order. But we can come close enough given effort and a little luck, even though those within the dream itself will perceive the effort as interference and if disturbed enough will respond, distorting the cosmic fabric even more.

It's interesting that your examples are mostly planetary. I don't know enough about Enjata Mo and her family, especially in Dara Happa.

[Akhôrahil]

Barntar and Voriof participating in The Descent from the Mountain before being born? 

[Joerg]

5 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

Recent review of the work of William S Burroughs (especially "Ah Pook") leads me to suspect that the anachronisms are the shadows of heroquest vehicles projected on what would otherwise be a coherent mythic situation . . . something like changing lines in an I Ching hexagram. When we go back there we bring our present, the mythic "future," with us and sometimes we leave bits behind, unintentionally or otherwise.

In a "dream logic" form of questing, such anachronisms don't even have any friction to chafe, but when you start counting the generations of Vingkotlings to determine when a Star Tribe has formed, you have left that dream logic, and the anachronisms do chafe.

Harmast's sythesized Westfaring visits locations which shouldn't be around as late in the Greater Darkness as the monomythically accepted departure of Orlanth from the hill of Vingkot Victorious. In that case, this may be pieces from a number of such journeys in various ages, sewn together to bridge gaps caused by chaotic annihilation of Cosmos and memories thereof.

 

 

5 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

It's interesting that your examples are mostly planetary. I don't know enough about Enjata Mo and her family, especially in Dara Happa.

The Dara Happans provide the sequential analysis for what is going on in the sky, even assigning years and dates for Godtime events. Applying these to other Godtime events outside of the Dara Happan scope may very well be a fallacy, but there are some sequential forms of the monomyth which can be supported by this.

Enjata Mo is KataMoripi aka Black Dendara, known to the Pelandans. Apparently the hell-bound form of Entekos, defining the full Sunpath then shared by Lokarnos (a new entity) aka Chermata, and possibly ignored by Veldara.

The Plentonius document that numbers the stars in the sequence of their documentation in the Gray Age by the Starseers of Yuthuppa appears to have disappeared from the current (pdf) volumes of the Stafford Library.

[scott-martin]

13 minutes ago, Joerg said:

In a "dream logic" form of questing, such anachronisms don't even have any friction to chafe, but when you start counting the generations of Vingkotlings to determine when a Star Tribe has formed, you have left that dream logic, and the anachronisms do chafe.

Definitely. I suspect that friction is why (among other things) the Compromise incorporates both harmony and disorder simultaneously . . . and why the logicians have yet to (dis)solve the world. The inner world itself may be only the parts of experience most resistant to a mythic overlay. We are the paradoxes. It takes a spell or more serious heroic measures to transcend them and realign experience with Godtime. Whenever we interact with the gone world we are the anachronisms.

The sky historically provides an external chronology but I wonder if we might reverse your sentence: Sequential analysis of what is going on in the sky produces the cultural / magical / ritual framework we call "Dara Happa." These were the people who numbered the days and noted the cycles. When they encountered other people with a different orientation to the past, resolving the conflicts became more urgent on all sides. (We are working toward extending the bull belt model east to buserian.)

The Stafford Library has a few voids around the sky. I recall Enjata Mo being equated with Black Dendara in my print RM (too busy typing to walk across the house and see) but the pdf has Black "Entekos," potentially a third entity of mask of the planet entirely. I need to know more about how KataMoripi resembles or differs from the Pamaltelan figure. For that matter I need to know a lot more about Pamaltelan astronomy.

[Sir_Godspeed]

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.

Edited January 22, 2020 by Sir_Godspeed

[scott-martin]

11 minutes ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

the God Time was never a single "timeline"

Here is my thought.

Every community starts with a coherent perspective on Godtime. No inherent contradictions, just a seamless experience.

When communities interact and share their perspectives, apparent contradictions emerge. Sometimes these interactions are spawned as internal divisions of identity / interpretation. Sometimes it happens when we meet the tribe in the next valley. Either way, that coherent experience fragments.

Whenever we try to negotiate those contradictions to create a synthetic truth, we are heroquesting on at least a humble local scale. Sometimes we succeed and the contradiction is transcended, becoming a new narrative large enough to unify our communities as far as it goes. Usually the results aren't perfect and the contradiction persists. We remain two communities and the larger perspective we jointly support remains inconsistent.

The failures of Gloranthan history revolve around these limits of "we" and "us" and "them."
 

[Sir_Godspeed]

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.

Edited January 22, 2020 by Sir_Godspeed

[scott-martin]

3 minutes ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

myth is ever even MEANT to be coherent.

Here in time, it isn't. Myth out here remains a disease of culture.

But the experience of myth doesn't start with awareness of discontinuities. It starts with a single story we are told or develop if for some reason nobody ever tells us how the world works. For Gloranthans who remain within that emic framework, that's where all explanations come from. They live and die within the envelope of local knowledge. To the extent to which it stretches to make our experience meaningful, it's as coherent as it gets. Otherwise it breaks down.

We sophisticates switch among multiple frameworks to negotiate the breaks. We're aware of the discontinuities so we're the ones looking for heroquest solutions. Nothing wrong with that, of course. It's where innovative magic happens.

[Akhôrahil]

17 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

They live and die within the envelope of local knowledge. To the extent to which it stretches to make our experience meaningful, it's as coherent as it gets. Otherwise it breaks down.

We sophisticates switch among multiple frameworks to negotiate the breaks. We're aware of the discontinuities so we're the ones looking for heroquest solutions. Nothing wrong with that, of course. It's where innovative magic happens.

Although once a Gloranthan is Illuminated, they become at least as good as us moderns at it.

[Sir_Godspeed]

1 hour ago, scott-martin said:

Here in time, it isn't. Myth out here remains a disease of culture.

But the experience of myth doesn't start with awareness of discontinuities. It starts with a single story we are told or develop if for some reason nobody ever tells us how the world works. For Gloranthans who remain within that emic framework, that's where all explanations come from. They live and die within the envelope of local knowledge. To the extent to which it stretches to make our experience meaningful, it's as coherent as it gets. Otherwise it breaks down.

We sophisticates switch among multiple frameworks to negotiate the breaks. We're aware of the discontinuities so we're the ones looking for heroquest solutions. Nothing wrong with that, of course. It's where innovative magic happens.

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.

Edited January 23, 2020 by Sir_Godspeed

[scott-martin]

43 minutes ago, Akhôrahil said:

Although once a Gloranthan is Illuminated, they become at least as good as us moderns at it.

Love it. The natives at least get instant feedback (good or bad) when they test a hypothesis. 

I don't want to give the impression that I'm rejecting the heterogenous godtime out of hand. I like the ramifications of building a cosmos out of chaos in order to achieve an integrated consciousness. It's just that the whole sense of a universal "godtime" in the first place can be too easy a construct when it's the only explanatory model. 

Most of us start with an origin once we become conscious. Our experience of it is unified. That's our godtime, call it Godtime-me. As we encounter the limits of that experience, our Godtime expands to comprehend new experiences. When those experiences push back, we encounter the other. Sometimes the other talks and we now have Godtime-me and Godtime-thou to negotiate, one way or another. We develop a sense of a larger hypothetical Godtime-Glorantha that incorporates everyone's explanations. It's probably going to contain contradictions until and unless we "know everything."

This is probably illuminate / lunar theology in itself and they debate what this means. Even illuminates don't see I to I.

[scott-martin]

7 minutes ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

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. 

 

Love it. This is a great journey for the brave! The stories contain their own discontinuities. The vocabulary of stories each of us knows varies from person to person. Initiates draw from a common pool of essential lore, but beyond that we still diverge from one another . . . and the Godtime-us we theoretically share becomes specialized. People fall apart and come together, world without end. "Culture" lives nowhere and everywhere, like a language.

[Sir_Godspeed]

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. 

Edited January 23, 2020 by Sir_Godspeed

[scott-martin]

1 minute ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

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.

Hot stuff! Gloranthans also have the upper hand here because the lucky ones can communicate directly with their collective effervescence (wyter) and know what unites them. We poor sophisticates have trouble with that sometimes.

[soltakss]

For me, the deities of God Time had some sequential events, where one followed another, but also had non-sequential events, where effect preceded cause.

However, HeroQuestors have one huge advantage over the denizens of God Time - They know what happened.

So, a HeroQuestor might meet a deity at one point, knowing what was going to happen to the deity at another point. On the face of it, this is nothing special, but HeroQuestors can manipulate it.

Also, HeroQuestors know that some magical places are common to different myths and events. They can manipulate that, too.

So, a HeroQuestor might be able to travel to the Only Old One's basement in the Castle of Black Glass. The HeroQuestor might know that this could be used on the Lightbringer Quest, as a way to enter Hell, or on a Caladra & Aurelion Quest to try and free Lodril, or whatever. The HeroQuestor could use the Caladra & Aurelion HeroQuest to gain access to the basement, then switch to the Lightbringer Quest to leave and enter Hell. These events happened at very different times, so this is effectively Chronoportation.

The tricky bit is to do this on a God Quest, so that you change God Time and create a new myth that this happened. So, you could travel to the Only Old One's basement, in the same way that Caladra & Aurelion did, then leave the basement and enter into Hell, but for you, as a Hero, it would all be at the same time.

[Jeff]

14 hours ago, scott-martin said:

Recent review of the work of William S Burroughs (especially "Ah Pook") leads me to suspect that the anachronisms are the shadows of heroquest vehicles projected on what would otherwise be a coherent mythic situation . . . something like changing lines in an I Ching hexagram. When we go back there we bring our present, the mythic "future," with us and sometimes we leave bits behind, unintentionally or otherwise.

And when we bring an encounter with them back from the Godtime it is like the fragmented experience we bring back when woken up out of a dream. The pieces just don't fit back together in any kind of logical order. But we can come close enough given effort and a little luck, even though those within the dream itself will perceive the effort as interference and if disturbed enough will respond, distorting the cosmic fabric even more.

It's interesting that your examples are mostly planetary. I don't know enough about Enjata Mo and her family, especially in Dara Happa.

What we know of Godtime is what we or others have experienced - those moments the separate worlds unite together. I saw the Battle of Stormfall, and watched Vingkot take a terrible wound. But in another quest, I saw Vingkot immolate himself atop his fiery pyre, surrounded by gods who died at that battle.

I am mortal, I do not exist in the Godtime. I piece it together as well as I can but even that is subject to mortal limitations. I know it is there - I've seen it, experienced it, tasted it - and I know it is endless and eternal, always there, always recurring. But it is divine, not mortal. 

[Videopete]

So god time runs on a similar premise of the Jeremy Bearimy time line.

[MOB]

34 minutes ago, Videopete said:

So god time runs on a similar premise of the Jeremy Bearimy time line.

Yep, checks out (vid has major spoilers for The Good Place):

 

[Cloud64]

19 minutes ago, MOB said:

Yep, checks out (vid has major spoilers for The Good Place)

Think I’ll stick with ‘wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey’, thanks, and take Jeremy Bearimy as an homage rather than a rip-off  <not blinking, not blinking at all> 

[Joerg]

On 1/23/2020 at 2:26 PM, Cloud64 said:

Think I’ll stick with ‘wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey’, thanks, and take Jeremy Bearimy as an homage rather than a rip-off  <not blinking, not blinking at all> 

Who is supposed to get such references

[Cloud64]

15 minutes ago, Joerg said:

Who is supposed to get such references

It's a Doctor Who reference. Only one of the most popular sci-fi shows in TV history. I'd expect plenty of people to get it. There's alway Google, but I supplied a link, so what's the problem?

Edited January 25, 2020 by Cloud64

[Joerg]

1 minute ago, Cloud64 said:

It's a Doctor Who reference. Only one of the most popular sci-fi shows in TV history. I'd expect plenty of people to get it. There's alway Google. 

I think I said so...

[Cloud64]

1 minute ago, Joerg said:

I think I said so...

Are we talking at cross-purposes?

[soltakss]

19 minutes ago, Joerg said:

On 1/23/2020 at 1:26 PM, Cloud64 said:

Think I’ll stick with ‘wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey’, thanks, and take Jeremy Bearimy as an homage rather than a rip-off  <not blinking, not blinking at all> 

Who is supposed to get such references

Just got Joerg's joke, little slow today. Bolded for those as slow as me ...