Your Dumbest Theory

[mfbrandi]

Now this is a dumb theory: a poem about Nontraya and Ernalda:

————————————————————————————————
Gaunt, blind, lame, shorn of ears and tail;
mangled, putrid, covered with worms;
starved, wizened, wearing an alms bowl shard
on his neck—a dog will still follow a bitch.
Passion smites even those bereft of life.
————————————————————————————————
Bhartrihari, Shataka-traya, Prologue 2, trans. Barbara Stoller Miller
————————————————————————————————

Bet he was a bundle of laughs. At a dinner party, make sure you are sat nowhere near the poet.

[scott-martin]

On 5/21/2023 at 9:53 AM, mfbrandi said:

we, the people, are the Unholy Trio

I keep coming back to this part because I don't see much space for this particular insight in the reformation of orlanthist collective identity after they killed their dragons and their other trickster languages got flooded out. But it's interesting to think about modern trickster as not so much a reactor in which the hill people generate and test innovative ideas . . . a thread like this one . . . and more of a repository for all the stuff they expressed over time that failed to make perfect sense. In this model, trickster is where we find the fossilized relicts of previous orlanth cults that died out everywhere else.

Maybe those fossil ideas include takes on the origin and limits of evil that got a little traction at some point in history but are unspeakable today. That's part of how all the now-fragmentary trickster aspects function. And in the fullness of Glorantha, this is where the failed ideas of the past get recycled into the reality of tomorrow as long as people are ambitious enough to be dissatisfied with extant institutional orlanth and desperate enough to leap into the unknown. For these people the institutional storm church is the dragon within . . . and we know how these dragons are sacrificed to themselves when they get stuck and need to move on.

I think this happens a lot more in historical and modern Ralios where they are open to the notion that the god of your fathers can be as much of a pain in the ass as the dad of your neighbor and that god is a dying god, the sacrifice. When you're already that far west, the light is different and so are the calculations, the ritual roles. Sometimes that means knowing how to convert a god into a dragon because you know how to deal with dragons. Sometimes that means knowing how to convert a god into a devil. What the architects of the theoretical fourth age brought back from the near west is unrecorded because the Dragon Pass oriented chroniclers didn't have the language for it. This doesn't have to stop us.

However, I came here to observe that illumination rolls happen at sacred time because that's when the illuminate is spiritually cast out of the ritual atonement and remains alienated from the cosmic order of things. That's the first big holy day when there are no negotiations between the community you came from and the person you are now. You've left the bronze age.

TRASH FROM A PRIOR DRAFT LEFT INTACT AS FOOTNOTES

. . . only alienated individuals can think the thought or communicate it within the general noise of trickster 

Alienated individuals can think this thought but it will be communicated through some kind of "trickster" vocabulary if at all. 

Edited May 23, 2023 by scott-martin

[mfbrandi]

4 hours ago, scott-martin said:

I keep coming back to this part because I don't see much space for this particular insight in the reformation of orlanthist collective identity after they killed their dragons

You are probably right that it doesn’t hang together with what came before. But one makes shit up as one goes along and if one likes the beginning and the end but they don’t like each other — the serpent bites its own tail — one lazily goes the full Walt Whitman or just as lazily hides behind a blizzard of question marks.

As for Trickster, if we regard that scamp as — like his pal Humakt and troubled Ragnaglar — storm-not-storm, as part of Orlanth Disintegrates (it wasn’t just the sun that went to pieces), I think you are onto something with:

4 hours ago, scott-martin said:

not so much a reactor in which the hill people generate and test innovative ideas … and more of a repository for all the stuff they expressed over time that failed to make perfect sense

But that is not necessarily (just) a matter of ‘cognitive’ sense — what is true, well attested, or coherent — but a matter of what makes ‘moral’ sense or can be owned-up to without too much shame, guilt, or self-disgust. So death and the crazy idea of loosing it on the universe get hived off to the personality fragments of Humakt and Eurmal. If that is right — big if — that maybe goes some way to explaining why the Orlanth-shaped hole seems like something the Orlanthi might want to occupy. But if the Orlanthi want to grow up, they need to re-integrate Humakt, Eurmal, Ragnaglar, & company — not stopping short of the Devil.

Yelm balancing life and death, and Sedenya balancing life and chaos seem at least to be talking the talk, but how many cultists walk the walk? Do we even know how?

—————————————————————
NOTES (chaotically unanchored)

1.
I say “Orlanth Disintegrates” but I suppose we shouldn’t give the old tosser priority.
The line of descent is perhaps: —>—>

A more charitable person than I might say that storm is at least a bit more together than disorder or chaos.

2.
However dead one’s dragons seem, they may rise up at any time — at least while creation is ongoing.

[mfbrandi]

“Yelmalio is the Solar deity found where Yelm’s imperial rule does not reach. Associated with the planet Lightfore, his cult brings Light to the darkest frontiers, and he is found among the Lightbringer barbarians and the elves. He is known by many names, including Antirius, Elmal, and Kargzant.” — Jeff Richard

“What happened at the Dawn? One version is that Antirius “chained” the Little Sun when the New Sun rose. The Yelm cult, as we understand it now, took a couple of centuries to take shape, as people discovered ways to draw magic from the New Sun.” — Jeff Richard
——————————————————————————————————————————————————

So that is the official story, but we come to this thread to fold, spindle, and mutilate, right? Some favourite themes:

• Yelm != the OG Sun (as good as admitted in having a New Sun at the Dawn)
• Little Sun cults are fractious: two cults, three opinions
• Bringing back the OG Sun would be dangerous
• There is a very close bond between burning, undead, illuminated ZZ and cold, undying, illuminating YO
• “Lay down, stay down” is most certainly not the YOZZ motto
• The Sun is a dying and reincarnating god
• Pocket Glorantha, the bubble world
• The secret of the light within
• Here we may reign secure, and in my choice // To reign is worth ambition though in hell

So the assassination of the OG Sun — with the aim of creating a pocket universe more easily dominated than the vastness of the real thing — was never meant to succeed fully: a truly dead Sun might reincarnate inside the dome, destroying the plotters’ power trip theme park.

The plotters include Sedenya and Orlanth, who fight among themselves. That old drunk ham, Yelm, is brought in to play the New Sun and front the post-Dawn set-up. The New Solar Regime’s obsession with “the old days, when things were done right” is to cover for the fact everything was made up yesterday. Fear of Chaos and the Outside is the fear of the return of the repressed, the overthrown — its power hidden, for now, in Darkness.

Yelmalio is kept alive and in chains as the last living fragment of the OG Sun. If Yelmalio were blown out, an illuminated vengeful OG Sun might be reborn. (Or perhaps — who knows? — reality would collapse entirely as Truth failed: game over.)

Antirius != Yelmalio. Antirius is Yelmalio’s gaoler.

But if Yelmalio is the last living representative of the Old Solar Regime, he is not the last active representative: undead Zorak Zoran — agonised, furious heat-without-light — doesn’t know when to give up. He will extinguish/illuminate his other half, and when they are reborn as one, how will they manifest? Will Sister Xiola — whose secret is her connection to the OG Sun; she merely pities stooge Yelm — be able to restrain them? Will they have any choice but to burn away Pocket Glorantha (Eurmal’s temporary reality ) entirely, rather than simply opening it up to the wider universe?

So we begin to have some sympathy for poor confused Elmali who swear on their horses’ lives that they used to worship the Sun, although they have now had it proved to them that Elmal != Yelm. Some other Little Sun cults are flat-out “Yelmic” fronts. All are confused — why wouldn’t they be?

Meanwhile XU is breeding UV-proofed trollkin in the hope that something can survive OG Sun Redux. And that is why Argan Argar — an older god than he seems — fought NSR Lodril? Perhaps, perhaps …

Runic associations of the returned Sun? This is tempting:

Spoiler

Although in my own private hell, we combine light and dark a little differently:

Spoiler

More pessimistic readings are available: might indicate the ultimate conflagration.
And perhaps and are not merely indicators of ZZ’s broken state but essential to the Sun.

Edited May 24, 2023 by mfbrandi
missing full stop

[mfbrandi]

1 hour ago, JeffDonizetti said:

Since Nochet is the largest metropolis in Genertela and so cosmopolitan … I was even surprised that we don't … have supplements dealing with this city.

Utterly unsurprising, really. I mean we are still waiting for the far more important TV competition/LARP, One Man & His Alynx: go beyond herding cats and use your cat to herd sheep — and to keep those pesky goat people out of the sheep pens.

Spoiler

For non-Brits, who were not scarred by One Man & His Dog: no, this is definitely not a thing.

[mfbrandi]

The secret of the light within:

We see the world through a half-silvered mirror,
but deep within each of us there has always been a source of light.

But don’t worry, be of good cheer: Xiola Umbar found the light switch. Click! That is why she is both the mistress of the secret of the light within and the provider of the solace of the dark deep within. Without Sister X, no true darkness.

Locate your own switch, flick it, and join the ranks of the extinguished. Only then will you be able properly to see the world without, the only world there is.

The refulgent are dazzled by their own reflected light and so remain in ignorance. They are ever the object of knowledge, never the knowing subject. Pity the Sun its brilliance.

Light is not the enemy, but it must be appropriately positioned: on the far side of the mirror. Everything in its right place.

If XU found the switch, what of her brother? You may think he ate the light bulb, munching hard on glass and metal. That is not quite right: he ripped the wiring out of the wall and traced through the grid back to the power station, then he swallowed the reactor core. But does he glow? He does not.

Argan Argar examined the glass and concluded that there was money in aviator mirrorshades. If he had found his inner light switch, he would probably have replaced it with a dimmer with no true ‘off’ position.

Spoiler

If the Uz have poor eyesight and avoid daylight, it is because they have not fully embraced the Umbrageous One and are still blinded by their own unacknowledged light. When they have achieved inner darkness, they will find that it is portable, and fear may loosen its grip.

Spoiler

Works for sound, too: if you are deafened by your own chatter, you will not hear the world.

[mfbrandi]

First: go buy @Brian Duguid’s new book on the black elves here.

Quote

A black elf on the path to severing “grows” within its head a separate self, which slowly learns that it can withhold information from the group mind. If it is nurtured, it can eventually grow strong enough for the black elf to escape the influence of the group mind and operate entirely independently. — The Voralans, p. 16

Severing is splitting from the group mind and is presented as a matter of indifference or sometimes a problem for the “parent” group mind, but it occurs to me that the group mind may sometimes encourage severing in one of its voralans, when what is needed is an agent who can think the unthinkable without contaminating the group mind.

Although … continued communion with Mee Vorala may prove to be a network security issue.

And there is always the possibility of reassimilating the severed voralan if/when its mind is again in a safe state, no?

[Any suggestion that this quick and dirty post is just a plug for Brian’s book is entirely …]

[scott-martin]

On 5/23/2023 at 3:08 PM, mfbrandi said:

death and the crazy idea of loosing it on the universe get hived off to the personality fragments of Humakt and Eurmal.

Thanks for reminding me that behind every dead god there's a storm brother
 

On 5/23/2023 at 3:08 PM, mfbrandi said:

However dead one’s dragons seem, they may rise up at any time — at least while creation is ongoing.

In my dream I was drowning my sorrows but my sorrows they learned to swim. Surfing farther and farther out these days on the prospect that storm is to trickster as sea is to dragon, which makes the long cold war of the imperial age a little more tragic.

"Clean cup, move down," shouted Robert Smith and the Banshees in their especially bizarre Play At Home special.

---

Multiple births were never common even when uz lived happy in the dark and yet it pleased the mistresses to fashion bodies with a superfluity of breasts to suckle at most a twin. Why so many? The greatest delight of the mistresses, I have been told by one who should know, was to make glad war on one another, with the [unlucky] forced to surrender their babies to the strong, so that the mistresses of mistresses would soon collect more sucklings than one womb could bear and more than a paltry pair of breasts could comfortably occupy. This is the origin of the rite you little ones call "adoption" but it really means forced rematriation, the song and dance of the new mother. 

After the hurt of the world this changed. Some mistresses were forced to abandon their babies and other mothers intervened to raise the orphans of their sisters. And the little mothers you know preserve the ability to suckle several sweet children even though they were not made to bear more than one at a time. "Like cats," I am told. 
 

[Brian Duguid]

55 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

Severing is splitting from the group mind and is presented as a matter of indifference or sometimes a problem for the “parent” group mind, but it occurs to me that the group mind may sometimes encourage severing in one of its voralans, when what is needed is an agent who can think the unthinkable without contaminating the group mind.

Later in the book, a method is presented which could be used to deal with a black elf (or indeed anyone) who has come to know the unknowable.

[mfbrandi]

Quote

Mee Vorala kept a small part of the secret of Death for herself. Others sought quick Death on the surface world, in a time of increasing struggle and fear. Amidst their growing battles they did not have the patience to see Mee Vorala’s slow Death, which she nurtured carefully within her bosom.
— @Brian Duguid, The Voralans, p. 28

How do you convert quick death to slow death?

Eat the handle
so that anyone making a grab for it will cut their fingers
admitting a few spores (or the children of Mallia)?

Edited May 30, 2023 by mfbrandi
whitespace

[mfbrandi]

On 5/29/2023 at 4:55 PM, scott-martin said:

The greatest delight of the mistresses … was to make glad war on one another … This is the origin of the rite you little ones call “adoption” but it really means forced rematriation

Or intraspecific kamikaze brood parasitism? Is this a sound reproductive strategy? (I am not saying it isn’t.) Is it the war of meme against gene?

Someone’s been lying to us about troll biology?

Or a designer fancied a bit of Diana of Ephesus in the game? [Ech!]

Spoiler

Footnote for the pernickety: the real Artemis at Ephesus — while certainly funny looking in her regalia — is very unlikely to have had extra breasts. But as this late copy is a fountain, they subscribed shamelessly to print the legend and damn the facts.

Edited May 30, 2023 by mfbrandi
Footnoted for Phil

[Mark Mohrfield]

The Kingdom of War is composed of all the Dungeons and Dragons characters we played as adolescents resurrected into Glorantha, which perfectly explains their behavior.

[mfbrandi]

1 hour ago, Mark Mohrfield said:

all the Dungeons and Dragons characters we played as adolescents

All those first-level thieves ignominiously done to death by The Small Giant Class Liberation Army — kobolds to you, sunshine. 😉

[mfbrandi]

Listings and orderings of various philosophical schools intersected with a binary division into astika and nastika. The ambiguity of the distinction lies in the literal meaning of the two words themselves — astika is asti+ka (one who says ‘it is’) and nastika is na+asti+ka (one who says ‘it is not’). What is being affirmed or denied (the ‘it’ in question) is unspecified, so the terms could be and were given varying content …

The fourth century Buddhist text Bodhisattvabhumi criticizes various types of Buddhists but reserves its strongest condemnation for those who hold a position of universal negation and say that nothing exists. Later texts identify them with Buddhists of the Madhyamika school …

While there were different views on what exactly made someone or a philosophical school or a religious group nastika, in all cases, the term had negative connotations. Nastikas were not only criticized; their views were condemned, and they were supposed to be shunned.

— Upinder Singh, Ancient India: Culture of Contradictions, pp. 200–201

——————————————————————————————————

Wherever I go, the Bodhisattvas boo me. Must be because I drive a nasty car. Or I would if cars — like everything else — had not signally failed to exist.

Calling someone chaotic is calling them nastika. It is a badge we should wear with what passes for pride — or is it humility? so hard to tell them apart! — out here on the nihilistic fringe.

[Qizilbashwoman]

13 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Listings and orderings of various philosophical schools intersected with a binary division into astika and nastika.

This reminds me that I remain perplexed by Western philosophy because I learned only Buddhist philosophy in college, and it was my minor. There is no problem with p-zombies for a Buddhist, for example: the idea is incoherent.

I don't know how I graduated Harvard without reading Kant, but I did. I didn't read a single Western philosopher!

[mfbrandi]

On 6/1/2023 at 12:37 PM, Qizilbashwoman said:

There is no problem with p-zombies for a Buddhist, for example: the idea is incoherent.

Philosophy of mind — hooray!

So I don’t for a minute want to defend an argument from philosophical zombies to “further facts” or — Arachne Solara preserve us! — dualism of substance, but exactly what is the Buddhist slant on the thing?

[Qizilbashwoman]

1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

Philosophy of mind — hooray!

So I don’t for a minute want to defend an argument from philosophical zombies to “further facts” or — Arachne Solara preserve us! — dualism of substance, but exactly what is the Buddhist slant on the thing?

if there is no self, then what is the difference between a p-zombie and a normal person? nothing. consciousness is an emergent value

basically, "we fake it till we make it" is how Buddhists define consciousness. the idea of a p-zombie is incoherent because there is no fundamental identity separate from the things that make us us.

[mfbrandi]

On 6/1/2023 at 12:37 PM, Qizilbashwoman said:

There is no problem with p-zombies for a Buddhist, for example: the idea is incoherent.

In case anyone was wondering, see “Zombies” by Robert Kirk in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It is not bad, but more on Aunty Ludwig’s private language argument might have helped — see, for example, Budd’s Wittgenstein's Philosophy of Psychology (but he was my supervisor, so I would say that). Also I seem to remember that Shoemaker was very good on “qualia”, “inverted spectra”, and the like — see Identity, Cause and Mind: Philosophical Essays.

“’Twas in another lifetime, one of toil and blood …”

[mfbrandi]

1 minute ago, mfbrandi said:

Dragons need a bit of their awe and mystery restored. Whole pantheons should quake before a dragon. A dragon shouldn’t have its head summarily removed by a petty wind thing. Wannabe heroes shouldn’t command packs of dragons as if they were attack dogs. Harrumph!

Dream dragons — we are assured — are the dreams of true dragons. But suppose dream dragons dream dragons, too. And their dreams. And their dreams’ dreams. And …

All strung out on a tree with its root in and its finest twigs in the most tenuous .

Whether its dreamer is a dream dragon or a true dragon, we can rightly call it a dream dragon — we define them recursively: a dream dragon is a dragon dreamed by a true dragon or another dream dragon.

Has anyone met a true dragon? Tearing apart the moon? A job for flimsy things only a couple of steps away from not existing at all.

Is every dragon dream another dragon? Is the cosmos made from the body parts of a dead primal dragon, or is it the dream of the dying cosmic dragon? Can its dying be held on some kind of event horizon indefinitely, or will the universe blink out when its utuma is complete?

Wakboth sometimes seems more serpent than goat. Some secretive Chaos sects claim that Kajabor dreamed Wakboth, then Wakboth ate Kajabor to prevent Kajabor from waking. Hyde slew Jekyll and then went about his business.

One group of draconic mystics seems to believe that there was only ever one true dragon. The inner cult is said to hold that the one true dragon was dreamed by the least real, the most tenuously oneiric of all dream dragons — barely a half-imagined skink.

Have the draconic mystics been infiltrated by the Kajabor swallowers, or is it the other way about? All we can be sure of is that somewhere Trickster is laughing. He cannot clap his hands, but he can laugh, and bang his head against soft, soft walls.

[DrGoth]

Ma

36 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

Dream dragons — we are assured — are the dreams of true dragons. But suppose dream dragons dream dragons, too. And their dreams. And their dreams’ dreams. And …

Ah, but dream dragons are so much weaker and smaller than true dragons. So the dragons they dream would be weaker and smaller again. And so on and so on. Perhaps there's an actual factor in it. Perhaps a dream dream dream ... dream dream dragon is infinitesimally small. But they never get to the vanishing point.

Like that Greek philosopher trying to prove that a door never closes (it closes half way, then half way again and again and again)

How many dream dream dream ... dream dream dragons can dance on the head of a pin?

Have you ever seen a dream dragon dancing? 

[mfbrandi]

2 minutes ago, DrGoth said:

Ah, but dream dragons are so much weaker and smaller than true dragons. So the dragons they dream would be weaker and smaller again. And so on and so on.

That was rather the point. People — and gods — believe they have been dealing with true dragons, but they have just been dealing with the dreams of dreams of … dreams of …

They have gotten the scale of the universe — which is just chopped dragon bits, from one true dragon — quite, quite wrong. “You think you have beheaded a dragon? Oh, Orlanth, you foolish little manchild!”

As for pin-dancing dream dragons, there are some “exquisitely specialised” clubs in Soho, but I would think very carefully before trying to talk your way past the bouncer. It’ll make you go blind. And that’s if you are lucky.

[mfbrandi]

Quote

[T]hat unhealable wound that Arkat contracted — apparently a spear wound to the foot … — during his initiation to the Cult of Humakt. — The Godlearners Podcast

An unhealable wound to the foot, eh? Perhaps it is swollen, has an oedema.

Perhaps Arkat is Oedipus: keen to find the cause of the plague only to find that he himself is the guilty party.

[scott-martin]

24 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

Perhaps Arkat is Oedipus: keen to find the cause of the plague only to find that he himself is the guilty party.

You know what they say about Oedipus and eye gods . . . Arkat goes out of his way to join (or construct) ZZ.

---

This is the elf heresy that drove many forests into the God Project and persisted in places like Rist into the terminal classic demi-birth period:





And this is the version young Arkat, not himself an initiate in the deep forest mysteries, took away from the trees of Brithos:

(secret figure)

Where the lost rune might be or even some other solution vanished in the fall of Stygia, but the last two are always the same.

 

[JRE]

If we accept the old lore that Arkat was illuminated by the elves of Brithos, it should be a rune in opposition to the other two.

It would be neat if the missing rune was Arkat's, though it is no secret. We know that the opposition to Death is Life, and that would be too easy. 

But what is the opposition to Law? Arkat is, for the West, an enemy of logic, a breaker of Laws, all they despise (and aspire to become, too). And it has the same simmetry as the Law Triangle, or the Illusion rune. The triple truth contained in illusion. The truth we know, the truth we feel and the truth that is, that we can never know. Which brings the Arkati illumination method of really believing two opposite truths at the same time. 

To be Arkat you need to first find three opposite truths, and then believe them simultaneously.

Or find three Pamalts. That would work too.

And what you get when you put one inside the other? 

 

[scott-martin]

10 minutes ago, JRE said:

And what you get when you put one inside the other? 

In theory we could declare a winner and wrap the thread up at this point . . . but only in theory. Here in daily life we'll go on.