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Please explain the Ignorant/Blood Sun religion to me.


Sir_Godspeed

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5 hours ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

There's also the time Yelm hooked up with the goddess of the night sky,

Do you recall where this story appears?

What references I've read to Basko from a Dara Happan perspective tend to describe him along the lines of the Emperor's Other/Kazkurtum: he's the one black spot behind Yelm, the one place he can't see (a framing that should be familiar from the sections in The Fortunate Succession about the Red Emperor and Sheng)--and, personified, he's a bumpkin dressed in tattered peasant's garb, with a goofy floppy hat and disgraceful manners, the opposite of Yelm in every way.

The idea of Basko being 'freed' by Yelm's disintegration dovetails nicely with the Uz story of finding a discarded Sky god of Darkness when they fled to the surface and empowering him with their worship.  The myth of the Black Sun's Glory battle against Chaos, where the Uz and Chaos monsters fought in ordered ranks, takes on a new resonance in the context of Basko claiming his place as the Solar Emperor of the Darkness and acting accordingly.  This is how The Fortunate Succession describes 'the enthronement of Kazkurtum':

When Antirius was dismembered, and Manimat had died, no sun shone in the sky, and the few stars which were there were chased around the sky by w monsters. The last cities of Dara Happa were overtaken by the Unpeople, which ruled things that had no sense of order or nature. They perverted everything which they touched, and sterilized the lands where they stayed.

Which definitely reads to me like after the demise of Manimat (or the Manimat Dynasty, as the Darjiini tell it), Basko led his Uz to conquer and rule the Solar Empire.  'Sterilizing the lands' sounds an awful lot like what an Uz kingdom in Peloria would do to the landscape without the mitigating, harmonizing influence of Argan Argar (compare how the Dara Happans remember this time, and how the Esrolians recall the same general period in the Lesser Darkness), and Uz are quite comfortable in urban settings that seem to humans like anarchic ruin, i.e. the Uz went about cheerfully in the wrecked, depopulated Dara Happan cities, after eating everything worth eating in the surrounding countryside.

From a few paragraphs later, this quote

The Power of the Empty Emperor is that there is No Center. The forces which exist there support digijelm, who devour the rot which was once at the heart of decrepitude. It returns to the world even now, and many emperors found themselves invoking these useless powers rather than the true Rule of Wisdom which Worship of Yelm would have given them.

would seem to prove a connection in the Dara Happan context between the Empty Emperor/Kazkurtum/The Emperor's Other and the Uz.

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28 minutes ago, dumuzid said:

Which definitely reads to me like after the demise of Manimat (or the Manimat Dynasty, as the Darjiini tell it), Basko led his Uz to conquer and rule the Solar Empire. 

I am pretty certain that the descendants of Kyger Litor never managed to rule Dara Happa. Who did were the Shadzorings of Dara Happa, hellspawn in the best tradition of Zorak Zoran, only affiliated with Shargash the Destroyer rather than with KL.

Check the God Learner Map of the Greater Darkness, or just about any Greater Darkness map. They all have Alkoth emanating a reign of terror.

 

Telling how it is excessive verbis

 

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6 hours ago, dumuzid said:

Do you recall where this story appears?

 

I scoured The Glorious Reascent, and it seems I must've misremembered. 

The goddess who claims a child by Yelm is Galgarenge, the Griffin Goddess. 

In my mind, this role was taken by a bat goddess, or night sky goddess. It turns out that the Bat Goddess is Mahaquata, which is also possibly Quatanara, the goddess of the Blue Moon Plateau - ie. associated with the Blue Moon goddess complex (and partial cause of Murhazam's death and Yelm's subsequent disintegration in Dara Happan mythology) The Night goddess is Netta - and is early on described as a part of Yelm's "Other" (and in a particular myth, the first Yelm recognizes as such, implying that she's the first Darkness entity he's acknowledged, I think). 

In my mind there existed some story where Netta may have been involved with Yelm, but from a Troll perspective of something (I forget the troll name of the goddess of the night sky). I am apparently wrong. 

Still, Netta and Yelm would be decent picks of parentage of Basko - a lineage that can of course coexist along with Basko as an expression of Yelm's Shadow. 

Anyway, it's probably a dead end.

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6 hours ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

I scoured The Glorious Reascent, and it seems I must've misremembered. 

The goddess who claims a child by Yelm is Galgarenge, the Griffin Goddess. 

In my mind, this role was taken by a bat goddess, or night sky goddess. It turns out that the Bat Goddess is Mahaquata, which is also possibly Quatanara, the goddess of the Blue Moon Plateau - ie. associated with the Blue Moon goddess complex (and partial cause of Murhazam's death and Yelm's subsequent disintegration in Dara Happan mythology) The Night goddess is Netta - and is early on described as a part of Yelm's "Other" (and in a particular myth, the first Yelm recognizes as such, implying that she's the first Darkness entity he's acknowledged, I think). 

In my mind there existed some story where Netta may have been involved with Yelm, but from a Troll perspective of something (I forget the troll name of the goddess of the night sky). I am apparently wrong. 

Still, Netta and Yelm would be decent picks of parentage of Basko - a lineage that can of course coexist along with Basko as an expression of Yelm's Shadow. 

Anyway, it's probably a dead end.

GRoY is the Dara Happan aristocracies presentation of the acceptable face of Yelm. It reveals much but it also conceals much.

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5 hours ago, Jeff said:

GRoY is the Dara Happan aristocracies presentation of the acceptable face of Yelm. It reveals much but it also conceals much.

Certainly! I just don't know where else I would have got the impression from, so unless someone else has something interesting from another source (TrollPak, maybe?) I'll leave it at this. :)

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