Your Dumbest Theory

[Erol of Backford]

So there you have it, from Land of Doom, you can get parts of the Unbreakable Sword and that of Nysalor's body.

A twofer.

Speaking Wheel knows where the rest of the parts are and if you bring them all to the Dwarves they will reassemble him without the egg shell and vines.

Nysalorankenstein

[mfbrandi]

I imagined that sensitive soul Zorak Zoran shyly sharing his verse with a few close friends and his sister. Then — seeing his trollish, haunted face — I wondered whether Baudelaire was the poet laureate of Glorantha.

Spoiler

The Enemy

Naught but a long blind tempest was my youth,
Sun-shot at times; the thunder and the rain
Have worked their havock with so little ruth
That in my garden few red fruits remain.

Now have I reached the autumn of my thought,
And shovel and pick must use some soil to save
From out the ruins that the rain hath wrought
Where all around great pits gape like the grave.

Who knows if these last flowers of my dreams
Shall find beneath this naked strand that streams
The mystic substance which their strength imparts?

O misery! misery! Time eats our lives,
And that dark Enemy who gnaws our hearts
Grows by the blood he sucks from us, and thrives.

— trans. Jack Collings Squire, Poems and Baudelaire Flowers (London: The New Age Press, Ltd, 1909)

Orlanth is to Baudelaire as Crowley is to Yeats?

[mfbrandi]

 Today in Your Dumbest Theory, some of my dumbest biology …

13 hours ago, hipsterinspace said:

Uleria survived because she is present whenever anything is joined together and something new is created. She is the primordial force that creates all living things, including every mortal … She survived because life and love survived, where those things are present she simply exists as a fact … she is immanent everywhere …

Once upon a time — before the Spike exploded — Gloranthans recognised two deities of life: Uleria (mother of eukaryotes) and Mallia (deity of prokaryotes: bacteria and archaea).

In the Greater Darkness, attitudes distorted and hardened: although Mallia and their children — and so life — predated love, sex, and Uleria, the very existence of the prokaryotes was denied, and Mallia was anachronistically reconceived as a goddess of death and the goddess of disease — wrong on multiple counts.

As a survival of the early universe, Mallia is associated with Chaos, but did not conspire with Ragnaglar and Thed to admit Chaos into the world: the world came from Chaos, has always been shot through with Chaos, and will collapse back into Chaos. Every child of Uleria with cells containing mitochondria (the ‘powerhouses of the cell’) or plastids (e.g. chloroplasts) owes a debt to Mallia and is therefore ‘tainted’ by Chaos.

Interestingly, many disease organisms are eukaryotes, children of Uleria: Entamoeba histolytica (amoebic dysentry) and Plasmodium falciparum (malaria), for example. Although syphilis (via Treponema pallidum) may be seen as Mallia’s ‘revenge’ on Uleria.

Distortions and echoes of the true story persist in the official version: ‘Mallia was a fertile goddess who … eventually broke from the alliance [with Ragnaglar] … Mallia is pervasive’; ‘[Uleria] may be the only deity of the Celestial Court to survive the Great Darkness, though some believe that that being which is worshipped in her name is only a small portion of the whole of Uleria.’

If ‘Uleria’ is meant to be synonymous with Life, then we may perhaps doubt one or more of these: (i) that the entity worshipped in that name is truly the Life rune’s owner; (ii) that means Life; (iii) that ‘Uleria’ has a stake in ; (iv) that there are no survivors of comparable or greater antiquity. But some sexually reproducing eukaryotes like to attempt to remake Cosmos in their image … and to sentimentalize ‘love’.

Perhaps the Uleria cult will have its Monrogh who will ‘prove’ that Uleria and Mallia were one all along, thus ending the small local difficulty. Maybe there was a long-standing scribal error concerning the sense of ‘predate’ in ‘Mallia predates Uleria’.

 

PS: Perhaps vampires like to drink blood because the mature mammalian red blood cell lacks both (Mallian) mitochondria and a(n Ulerian) nucleus; and they definitely won’t eat their greens.

Edited March 20, 2023 by mfbrandi
spelling

[scott-martin]

5 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

PS: Perhaps vampires like to drink blood because the mature mammalian red blood cell lacks both (Mallian) mitochondria and a(n Ulerian) nucleus; and they definitely won’t eat their greens.

As we know  rotated 90 degrees is  but put a stake through it and you get  . . . "hunger," sometimes "bat."

A lot of great things on this thread but I want to tease out a bit more here. Where is Chalana Arroy, enemy / sister of Mallia from the other angle? After all, the other uleria thread reveals that  is also the intersection of opposites, ascending  and descending  or 🔯 . . . whereas CA is identified in certain archaic sources with a single negative "mountain" () that descends into absence instead of rising, a mystic hole in the ground. What does she refuse that her sisters embraced?

But  as Greg insisted is infertile, which makes JarEel's superheroic mission interesting.

[Erol of Backford]

Honestly I have been waiting for someone to bring up vampires...

When Goliathan vampires need false (they are telling a tall tale if they say they brush) teeth they are made of bronze. Gold, even when enchanted isn't hard enough to bite through armor. Silver tarnishes and just doesn't cut it aesthetically for these eccentric fellows.

Iron isn't needed as it's in the blood they drink and they don't want to get liver trouble.

Other metals would easily fit here if we wanted to discuss further... be my guest.

I bet there is a Hero Cult for ducks that wish to be dentists but none of the authors is brave enough to post the write-up?

On the same note Gloranthans must mostly smell and surely have bad teeth. It's a good thing its a fantasy world as otherwise we'd all have clothespins on our noses.

    

[mfbrandi]

4 hours ago, scott-martin said:

As we know  rotated 90 degrees is  but put a stake through it and you get  . . . "hunger," sometimes "bat."

I think of as an hourglass: as the sand (matter–energy) flows through from one half to the other, one Void is polluted/one Cosmos born … and the universe next door reverts to nothing; flip and repeat; time in a bottle. (See also Orlanth’s self-trepanning.)

I cannot help but see as a bow tie and the undead as clowns. But taking your lead, the ‘stake’ is a barrier between the chambers of the hourglass overdetermining the no-flow condition — the thing is horizontal, anyway. The vampire as cut off from Life, the interplay of Chaos and Cosmos.

4 hours ago, scott-martin said:

 as Greg insisted is infertile

I didn’t know that, but it figures. I don’t go for as linked to communication — nothing touches — but that is old Issarian ground. where art thou?

4 hours ago, scott-martin said:

Where is Chalana Arroy, enemy / sister of Mallia from the other angle? … What does she refuse that her sisters embraced?

Try something like this …

We could say that unlike Mallia, she can only see ‘half’ of life. If she succeeded in wiping out the children of Mallia, she would wipe out the children of Uleria, too: eukaryotes need prokaryotes.

But maybe even this undersells it: she sees what is going on, but she refuses the ‘taint’ of Chaos Mallia brings to all Life.

Does this make her a Death goddess in disguise? Maybe better an Unlife goddess: when the scribes wrote

perhaps lighting conditions were poor or wishful thinking strong; perhaps this was there to be seen:

Undeath is not made by toppling Life and staking it — why would a vampire in its undead condition already be staked? — but from a simple twist of Fate combined with ownership of Harmony.

Fate as fatalism. Harmony as parallel lines that never touch, as communication and contact refused. Zombiedom as the ultimate asceticism — supreme purity — cutting oneself off from Life but denying Death. The bug broom is not to save the children of Gorakiki and Aranea but to emphasize and ensure the ascetic’s purity.

Life requires Death, Communication, and Chaos, else nothing flows. Chalana Arroy refuses this, so she is a deity of Unlife, not sister to Uleria or Mallia. Like Clark Kent and Superman, did you ever see Chalana Arroy and Gark the Calm together?

There is no ‘Resurrection’ spell and at least the more honest ‘Create Zombie’ is cheaper. When Humakti and Death Lords put aside their differences and get blind drunk together — without fail — they will begin plotting to torch the nearest ‘nest’ of White Ladies. The sober Humakti know that the project is politically impossible. The hungover Humakti reflect on their own asceticism and possible zombie status. If a Zorak Zorani is close to their god, they know that we are all zombies but that at least some of us have a fire inside.

Or you know, something like that …

Edited March 20, 2023 by mfbrandi
text flow

[scott-martin]

29 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

[Yēlm-ašarēd]

8 hours ago, Erol of Backford said:

On the same note Gloranthans must mostly smell and surely have bad teeth. It's a good thing its a fantasy world as otherwise we'd all have clothespins on our noses.

Cleaning your teeth goes all the way back to Sumeria in 3,500 BC, where they used chew sticks. Semi-regular bathing has been going on for far longer, and since Glorantha is a Bronze Age to early Iron Age world, bathhouses are probably all the rage in places like Esrolia and Peloria (though it must be noted that Roman bathhouses were not clean places, but you can't win it all). I'd imagine the average Gloranthan would have fairly decent teeth, and would probably wash at least once a week. If the Lunars are anything like the Romans, they bathe a lot; the Red Emperor might even be bathing as much as two times a day! As for smelling bad, that's what the perfumes are for.

I think any vampire that needs false teeth is probably in some pretty dire straits to get to that point. I'd personally go with enchanted iron and engrave on my teeth, both to make sure I don't lose them and as a statement of my allegiance and wealth. Any discomfort is just the price one has to pay to look good.

[DrGoth]

4 hours ago, Yēlm-ašarēd said:

Cleaning your teeth goes all the way back to Sumeria in 3,500 BC, where they used chew sticks. Semi-regular bathing has been going on for far longer, and since Glorantha is a Bronze Age to early Iron Age world, bathhouses are probably all the rage in places like Esrolia and Peloria (though it must be noted that Roman bathhouses were not clean places, but you can't win it all). I'd imagine the average Gloranthan would have fairly decent teeth, and would probably wash at least once a week. If the Lunars are anything like the Romans, they bathe a lot; the Red Emperor might even be bathing as much as two times a day! As for smelling bad, that's what the perfumes are for.

I think any vampire that needs false teeth is probably in some pretty dire straits to get to that point. I'd personally go with enchanted iron and engrave on my teeth, both to make sure I don't lose them and as a statement of my allegiance and wealth. Any discomfort is just the price one has to pay to look good.

I have an urge to write a speciality cult spirit spell of "clean teeth".
Or maybe it's a one-use rune spell that gets enchanted into paste....

[Joerg]

12 hours ago, Erol of Backford said:

Honestly I have been waiting for someone to bring up vampires...

When Goliathan vampires need false (they are telling a tall tale if they say they brush) teeth they are made of bronze. Gold, even when enchanted isn't hard enough to bite through armor. Silver tarnishes and just doesn't cut it aesthetically for these eccentric fellows.

Martin Laurie posted a number of stories about an extreme Humakti by the name of Onslaught in the old days of the Digest who had the charming feature of having iron teeth (much like Richard Kiel in those Moore Bond movies).

 

12 hours ago, Erol of Backford said:

 

   

 

 

Here's a link to Onslaught's RQ3 stats. Use the search engine if you want to explore this more, at your own risk.

https://glorantha.steff.in/digests/GloranthaDigest/vol02/3103.html

12 hours ago, Erol of Backford said:

Iron isn't needed as it's in the blood they drink and they don't want to get liver trouble.

Common misconception... There is very little iron in haemoglobine, and it is not metallic. Your common dark-colored piece of flint or obsidian contains more non-metallic iron than the same mass of blood (which is mostly water, salts, and sugars with white blood cells and thrombocytes contributing to the floating cells that carry haamoglobine on their surfaces).
 

[mfbrandi]

10 hours ago, scott-martin said:

Cannot fault the Sun–Spider on orientation or appetite. You won’t catch her fretting about Chaos and purity.

The less charming version of the hourglass model of the cosmic cycle is that the Spider — head down — vomits forth Cosmos, flips 180° and sucks it/us all back in again, flips 180°, rinse and repeat.

But I am lazy and repeat myself. Bring me new heresies to digest!

[mfbrandi]

3 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

The less charming version of the hourglass model of the cosmic cycle is that the Spider — head down — vomits forth Cosmos, flips 180° and sucks it/us all back in again, flips 180°, rinse and repeat.

May as well have its own “info graphic”:

[scott-martin]

7 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Bring me new heresies to digest!

I owe more spider talk that might even open up a sense of the troll gods but  in practice looks more like  . . . thinking about  and  here though, an old Joseph Campbell lecture is playing in the office today and he just touched on the tension between world negating mythologies in which life is a disease (mythology is a disease of language, mind is a disease of semen) and the world affirming mythologies in which life can be cured or at least treated.

Chalana Arroy.

[mfbrandi]

2 hours ago, scott-martin said:

I owe more spider talk … Joseph Campbell … just touched on the tension between world negating mythologies in which life is a disease (mythology is a disease of language, mind is a disease of semen) and the world affirming mythologies in which life can be cured or … treated.

Err, really? So world-negating and world-affirming mythologies both regard life as a disease but differ as to the prognosis. JC sounds as depressed as Tiptree: is the Plan the Plan is (and a bunch of others).

As for “the natural conclusion of the joining of a man and woman in love is the birth of a child” — at least now we know what made the Spider throw up.

“Healing, however. Healing falls in the realm of Harmony, of returning something to the state it was in before it was disrupted.” Now this may be a narrow way to look at medicine, but if I read it right, it is worse than that implying harmony [is] returning something to the state it was in before it was disrupted. (Good luck running the sand back up the hourglass to a point where everybody is happy. The unspoken assumption is that we wind back to the point where we are happy and screw them?) I don’t think I would include that in a training package for diplomats. Definitely no thesis (prior state) + antithesis (disrupting stimulus) = synthesis (new normal), here. Let’s say Greg was trying to think like a Gloranthan: “Who moved my cheese? I must destroy them utterly and anyone who knew them even slightly. Then I can move my cheese 2 mm north, restoring it to its cosmically ordained position.”

But yeah, this does all sound very CA and Uleria.

Spoiler

[John Biles]

39 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

Err, really? So world-negating and world-affirming mythologies both regard life as a disease but differ as to the prognosis. JC sounds as depressed as Tiptree: is the Plan the Plan is (and a bunch of others).

 

I think he didn't convey Cambell's vision well - the life affirming ones say 'life has some bad things, but that's not a reason to reject the world, rather, you have to live in it instead of living for some other world to come'.

 

39 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

 

“Healing, however. Healing falls in the realm of Harmony, of returning something to the state it was in before it was disrupted.” Now this may be a narrow way to look at medicine, but if I read it right, it is worse than that implying harmony [is] returning something to the state it was in before it was disrupted. (Good luck running the sand back up the hourglass to a point where everybody is happy. The unspoken assumption is that we wind back to the point where we are happy and screw them?) I don’t think I would include that in a training package for diplomats. Definitely no thesis (prior state) + antithesis (disrupting stimulus) = synthesis (new normal), here. Let’s say Greg was trying to think like a Gloranthan: “Who moved my cheese? I must destroy them utterly and anyone who knew them even slightly. Then I can move my cheese 2 mm north, restoring it to its cosmically ordained position.”

 

 

Healing a body is not about synthesis.  IT is, in fact, about returning to the pre-problem state as much as you can.  The essence of being a doctor is not synthesis, it's about returning to the synthesis.  If you had cancer, would you want to accomodate the tumor?

 

 

[mfbrandi]

13 hours ago, John Biles said:

The essence of being a doctor is not synthesis, it's about returning to the thesis.  If you had cancer, would you want to accommodate the tumor? [edited for clarity]

There is being a doctor and there is healing. Sometimes when a patient has cancer, accommodating it is the right course of action: the cancer is progressing slowly and something else will kill the patient first, so leave it be. I agree, of course, that this is not healing the patient of their cancer.

Consider the case where someone has an immune system which would overreact to a stimulus if exposed to it: is there harmony before they are exposed to the stimulus? If we say that there is and that exposure to the stimulus would cause disruption — because it would cause inflammation — what would we conclude about healing as restoring harmony? Remove the stimulus? Put a barrier between the stimulus and the patient? Alternatively, treat the patient with immunosuppressants to enable them to live with the stimulus. Now this is a return to the prior state in the (thin?) sense that previously there was no inflammation, but the new situation has features that the prior ‘harmonious’ state lacked: the presence of the stimulus and a less hair-trigger immune system. ‘Restore harmony’ is not really a theory of medicine, it is a vague picture. Perhaps sometimes it will suggest helpful courses of action, but if it is the only thing one thinks of, it might perhaps mislead.

Taking the more general case of restoring harmony, suppose a refugee population (the newbies) arrives in an area where the existing population (the grogs) had previously enjoyed a ‘harmonious’ existence — this might be disruptive and produce ‘dissonance’, but what is the best way to think about the problem? The grogs might think that harmony should be restored by sending the newbies ‘back where they came from’. Well, that might fix the grogs’ problem — ‘heal’ them (yes, I know) — but what about the newbies? Maybe the newbies old home is now radioactive slag or a vampire nest and those problems are not going away any time soon. They cannot achieve ‘harmony’ by winding things back, they need something new. Sure, to be acceptable their new situation will need to have some features of their life before the bombs or the bloodsuckers arrived, but it will need to have new features, too, notably location. And the grogs may have to change to accommodate the newbies. Now maybe we can still file finding an acceptable synthesis under ‘harmony’, but that is not harmony conceived as restoration of a prior state in all its concrete details. Of course, one can always say ‘the old state was acceptable, the new accommodation is acceptable — you see: healing = harmony = restoration!’ — you can push toward generality till you find something in common between the old and new states, but how helpful is that in finding the new accommodation? The grogs new life may be as good as their pre-newbie life, but it may be very different, perhaps in profound ways, no?

If you have a picture that is not a testable theory, it may be hard to disprove(!), but that doesn’t mean that it is right or helpful. That is not to say we should all be little Karl Poppers in every aspect of our lives, nor that ‘pictures’ that are sometimes unhelpful are not also sometimes suggestive of solutions.

[Eff]

14 hours ago, John Biles said:

Healing a body is not about synthesis.  IT is, in fact, about returning to the pre-problem state as much as you can.  The essence of being a doctor is not synthesis, it's about returning to the synthesis.  If you had cancer, would you want to accomodate the tumor?

When it comes to cancer, the most effective treatments (radiotherapy, chemotherapy) involve damaging large quantities of healthy tissue. Even surgical excision still requires some damage to healthy tissue, and may require a full removal of an organ, or large parts of one. There is thus a necessity for a kind of synthesis, because there is no guarantee of returning to the thesis, absent the aftereffects of treatment. 

But of course,  is a musical term, referring to multiple independent sounds and their synthesis into a piece of music. 

[scott-martin]

14 hours ago, John Biles said:

If you had cancer, would you want to accomodate the tumor?

People have done it. I have an old friend with what's turned into inoperable but relatively stable brain cancer. Until they find a cocktail that can target it, we're stuck with figuring out how to keep it calm. Other friends have decided to engage in similar negotiations with prostate. You might not "want" to accommodate it, but that's what happens. 

Campbell was not an oncologist but he managed to die of it . . . and flips this very same metaphor around 27:00-29:00 to beg the question of whether the tumor should try to accommodate the host, growing slowly for example to get more life. This is central to my evolving view of esoteric CA as distinct from esoteric Uleria. If we are to have plural great goddesses then let them be more than masks for one another.

1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

The grogs might think that harmony should be restored by sending the newbies ‘back where they came from’.

This RETVRN aspect of  in the Greg discussion is truly chilling. Campbell notes that every generation is a kind of "problem" for the ones that come before and after . . . the spirit of every age is a disease spirit. But it is also a cure for a different disease, much like language is the cure and cause of forgetting and, again, in Müller, mythology itself is the productive disease or parasite on language. On the other tentacle, the nysalorites had their talking healers too.

[g33k]

I kind of feel like people are dancing around the central issue of "return to the prior (ideal) state" that is implicit to Glorantha & Chaos.  Nobody seems to have actually said it.

Chaos is the prior state.
 

Glorantha is the blip, the aberration, the disharmony.

[Qizilbashwoman]

7 minutes ago, g33k said:

I kind of feel like people are dancing around the central issue of "return to the prior (ideal) state" that is implicit to Glorantha & Chaos.  Nobody seems to have actually said it.

Chaos is the prior state.
 

Glorantha is the blip, the aberration, the disharmony.

man, what is this, exalted? /jk

[Qizilbashwoman]

17 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

JC sounds as depressed as Tiptree:

oof i hope not given how he died

[Eff]

1 hour ago, g33k said:

I kind of feel like people are dancing around the central issue of "return to the prior (ideal) state" that is implicit to Glorantha & Chaos.  Nobody seems to have actually said it.

Chaos is the prior state.
 

Glorantha is the blip, the aberration, the disharmony.

 

[soltakss]

1 hour ago, g33k said:

Chaos is the prior state.

Indeed it is.

 

[mfbrandi]

2 hours ago, g33k said:

Nobody seems to have actually said it. Chaos is the prior state. Glorantha is the blip

Yeah, but I say it so often I figure (a) people are sick of it & (b) it goes without saying. 😉

Edited March 22, 2023 by mfbrandi
whitespace

[mfbrandi]

3 hours ago, scott-martin said:

This RETVRN aspect of  in the Greg discussion is truly chilling.

Although, to be charitable to Greg, we can say that he wouldn’t expect a single rune ever to provide a solution: won’t really fix your medical problem without or . But in the context of trying to distinguish the domains of two runes, one wouldn’t emphasize that.

A rune’s power is only a virtue in the right context. Ompalam had until retconned.

Edited March 22, 2023 by mfbrandi
deleted definite article