Your Dumbest Theory

[JRE]

The obvious consequence of the above is that what turned Kargan Tor Separation rune into Humakt's Death Rune, including its new role as opposite of Life is Chaos, that made the effects mostly permanent. Fortunately he is illuminated, so others do not notice the chaos in the sword.

[JRE]

11 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

• The school of the Wool Cloaks seeks complete submission and the annihilation of the self.
  Our adepts are the only truly liberated mortals in all of Glorantha.
  Pick up a leaflet at the door.

As it stands, it reads like the submission is only a means to the end of esoteric knowledge (which will then be used in the usual sledgehammer fashion). When it comes to the writers’ attitude to mysticism (by which I don’t mean unlocking one’s hidden superpowers), I am never sure whether:

Many Earth religions propose the annihilation of the self, from subsumption in the Godhead to achieving Nirvana, so in itself it is not unusual. Many ancient Greeks preferred Oblivion to becoming a shadow in Hades hall. If you assume a continuous wheel of reincarnating suffering through Ompalam, the Wool Cloaks are looking more attractive in each turn of the wheel. So no real benefit except being free (I suppose when you die, as you are not free right now). An end in itself.

[mfbrandi]

17 minutes ago, JRE said:

Humakt's … is illuminated, so others do not notice the chaos in the sword.

There is always chaos in a sword, and H is the greatest of the lords of terror.

17 minutes ago, JRE said:

What turned Kargan Tor’s Separation rune into Humakt's Death Rune — including its new role as opposite of Life — is Chaos.

[editing mine]

As in its rôle as agent of thinning, Chaos brings Order to the world: assuming Life was already Life (and not Glue), we had two power runes flapping around unpaired. And Life as Fertility must encompass Separation, just as Death returns us to the One (or the None).

Edited August 4, 2023 by mfbrandi
a —> as

[mfbrandi]

6 minutes ago, JRE said:

the Wool Cloaks … no real benefit except being free (I suppose when you die, as you are not free right now)

No: right here, right now, surely. The mystic needs no afterlife.

Something like: everything that ever was or ever will be is God’s will; you cannot fight God and win; if you submit to God’s will, you will meet no resistance, but those who struggle are frustrated again and again; who then is free?

(There is probably a more sophisticated version dragging in God’s perfect knowledge of future contingents, but I won’t attempt it.)

Viewed timelessly, those who submit to God’s will accept what is, those who struggle against it deny reality. This self-conscious denial has its appeal, too, but do we call it freedom?

[For the avoidance of doubt: I am not now and have never been. And I can make no sense of free will. A believer may have made a better fist of it.]

[scott-martin]

1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

Wool Cloaks [] submission

This bit is unfortunate given the call of the masarin, abduction from the seraglio plots and so forth. However, relatively few hardcore gamers encounter the folk etymology for "sufi" (or even "islam") in their travels so the ticking needle in the heart remains there. Ironic because I was going to drop in to flag your "what is / what is not" as my preferred way to start a fairy tale in Arabic: kan ya ma kan, it was and it was not there. 

Otherwise I aim to interact more intensively with this thread and all of you soon but have been distracted with 3-4 tons of rock being moved in the front yard and now the trees are going in. Look at all the great things you're doing!

1 hour ago, JRE said:

new role

OBTheory: as in sanskrit, death is illusion spelled backward.

Edited August 4, 2023 by scott-martin
kan "maya" kan

[mfbrandi]

8 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

This bit is unfortunate

It is, but it didn’t occur to me that we weren’t supposed to spot it. If I sometimes turn a sympathetic eye on the creations (even if I look at them askew) and try to redeem them, I hope it doesn’t come across as making excuses for their creators. I am not here to beat them up, but I am not here to defend them either.

18 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

3–4 tons of rock being moved in the front yard and now the trees are going in

So that’s Aldrya one, Mostal nil?

[mfbrandi]

49 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

OBTheory: as in sanskrit, death is illusion spelled backward.

Tearing away the veil, or just looking at it from the other side?

[scott-martin]

6 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

It is, but it didn’t occur to me that we weren’t supposed to spot it. If I sometimes turn a sympathetic eye on the creations (even if I look at them askew) and try to redeem them, I hope it doesn’t come across as making excuses for their creators. I am not here to beat them up, but I am not here to defend them either.

Oh yes, there was no intentional implication here that you are apologizing for the creators. For one thing, making excuses for their choices is my go-to posture. For another, they are just fallible people even if we have to respect the creation as its own independent revelation, as you do. We wrestle with it because we love it.

Somewhere in the massive and long deferred take on Arachne Solara is a dissection of Greg's ambivalence (even antipathy) toward "mysticism" as we understand it around here, as opposed to this-worldly "paganisms" or "shamanisms." I think that shows up with the Wool Cloaks and other scene dressing. But some day, not yet!

16 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

So that’s Aldrya one, Mostal nil?

The goal is to integrate them back into a dyad . . . both halves of the project budget are roughly the same size even though I bristled a little at having to pave a few more square feet in order to get the hardscape. Ironically the elemental bias revealed here is that grower is really just a local form of water. She flows. Unregulated she flows too fast unless you can intervene by surfacing maker features in the system. But there is very little room for unregulated water in the terminal third age we know, the endless opening crawl of Prospero's Books.

[John Biles]

6 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

As it stands, it reads like the submission is only a means to the end of esoteric knowledge (which will then be used in the usual sledgehammer fashion). When it comes to the writers’ attitude to mysticism (by which I don’t mean unlocking one’s hidden superpowers), I am never sure whether:

1. it is hostile, but they like to give the Devil the best lines
2. it is hostile, but I sometimes think it is ambivalent because I am sympathetic
3. it is ambivalent
4. it is sympathetic, but it is wrapped up in the monstrous as a tease (this seems a stretch, even for me)

The cynic in me says one of the low numbers has it.

In Glorantha, there's essentially two kinds of mystics - the ones who achieve enlightenment, and have zero impact on the world, leaving it to rot in selfish pursuit of enlightenment, or the ones who cant let go of the word and their mystic accomplishments enable them to become history's greatest monsters.  Mystics end up either selfishly neutral or pure evil on a stick.

 

6 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

So couldn’t we get the advantages of thinning — “Peace between Chaos and what is not Chaos” — by just cutting off the Sacred Time POW supply, without the need for the melodramatic feeding of the gods to Wakboth? Or maybe that is what happened: tired out by the holy wars, people fell away from religion, and there was a slow, creeping secularisation; some wag later wrote the fairy story of Argrath and the Devil to jazz it up (or to lay the groundwork for a religious revival).

My pet theory is that as the world begins to make sense and the gods fade into traumatic memory, Gloranthan imaginations flourish and their poetry improves immeasurably.

Ending sacred time celebrations is a great way to let the whole world get eaten by Chaos.  You have to make a new order, not just cut the power supply to what holds the world together, if you want to change things.

(And in Glorantha, if you want to make big metaphysical changes, you are certainly riding the crazy train and will only end up slaughtering people for nothing.)

 

[mfbrandi]

4 hours ago, John Biles said:

the [mystics] who achieve enlightenment, and have zero impact on the world, leaving it to rot in selfish pursuit of enlightenment … You have to make a new order, not just cut the power supply to what holds the world together, if you want to change things.

The context was @JRE’s admirably positive vision of the Fourth Age (although the interpretation is mine, so don’t blame them):

Quote

the actual aim of allowing the gods and the whole god time magical extraction apparatus [to] fall apart / perform a sacred Utuma and leave Glorantha for good, finally enlightened … And at the end, Chaos will no longer be an existential menace to Glorantha, just a part of it, … as the old war that the gods refused to finish because it meant they were beaten, has finally ended.

And Peace between Chaos and what is not Chaos arrived. That is what the Fourth Age really represents, for me.

That gives a concrete example of mystics stepping into the Void and leaving the rest of us behind to recover, rather than to rot — though sure as eggs is Krarsht, we will all rot in the end.

How does the story go: a man — or possibly a white person — asks what they can do for the revolution, and they are told ‘just step out of the way’? If you are in a hole, stop digging. If you are part of the problem, stop doing what you are doing. Sometimes the right thing to do is to do nothing or to remove oneself from the situation — this doesn’t always have to be called ‘selfishness’. As you note yourself, those who always think that something must be done — and of course, they are always the perfect ones to do it — often get a lot of people killed.

Spoiler

The gods cannot fix the world — or even maintain it efficiently — as they are trapped in their Gods War loop, constantly flashing back to ’Nam, and keeping the mortals at each others’ throats. The gods are just tape loops charged up with magical energy, and they are destructive. They cannot make a plan for what comes after them, as they are incapable of novel thought — they lobotomised themselves as part of the Compromise. All they can do is stop; they might just about be able to manage that — if not, someone else can switch them off. This sounds nihilistic? Well, the Bazarov in us never truly dies: ‘We act by virtue of what we recognize as beneficial. At the present time, negation is the most beneficial of all — and we deny.’ (Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons)

So we have the notion that the world thins — the gods die and the magic goes away — and Glorantha becomes Earth or at least more Earthlike. That is hardly a radical position in ‘Glorantha studies’, so if it crops up in a thread dedicated to Gloranthan heterodoxy and gets subjected to a bit of variation, isn’t that at the milder end of what one might expect? I am not claiming to be the way, the truth, and the light — that the only way to Glorantha is through me. This is the place to be cheerfully wrong — in my case, often more wrong than I intend.

JRE had the gods stop being characters out of E. R. Eddison. I had the people stop enabling them. (But they are just different perspectives on the Boulez solution to the problem of opera, I guess.) What is the right way to thin Glorantha? It is surely going to get thinned. And it needs it, right?

Spoiler

Why do the gods seem essential?

Maybe it works like this:

• worshippers send a lot of vital energy from this world to the gods
• stripped of the energy it needs, the world doesn’t work right
• until the gods give back some of what we foolishly provided them
• they don’t give it all back, so things still look touch and go
• clearly, we will have to ask the gods for help again next year

I am sure Marx or Tressell would see a parable in this.

Edited August 4, 2023 by mfbrandi
whitespace

[Akhôrahil]

The Beast Rune is actually a D4 as seen from above.

[Joerg]

I got inspired to a new weird expansion of my "Mostal is a von Neumann-probe" theory by a question about Sedenya on the Chaosium Discord: https://discord.com/channels/311619921639505922/311638496412565505/1137668946544308234

Basically, the Pseudocosmic Egg is a hatchling universe, one to be spawned into the Void outside of Glorantha. During the Sunstop it released not just Osentalka the Perfect God (a re-incarnation of Rashoran) but also the Young Elementals.

In episode 24 of the God Learners podcast I speculated about there having been eight of these eggs, as eight is a significant number in the Mostali cosmogeny. And coincidentally there were eight planetary sons of Yelm, one of them being Verithurus(a), nowadays identified as a emanation or incarnation of Sedenya.

What struck me now is the question whether Sedenya may be the (yet unborn) soul of the daughter universe of Glorantha still trapped inside the Pseudocosmic Egg, creating emanations of herself to act in the universe of her mother much like the immature dragon egg of a dragonewt does. What if all the planetary sons of Yelm are emanations of the future universes, learning from the current emperor of the world?

What if Rashoran was an attempt by the Sedenya egg (which later birthed Osentalka) to lessen the impact of the Gods War?

The transitory nature of Lunar Glamour would be explainable through this, and the Red Goddess's (and Nysalor's) establishing an alternate reality inside Glorantha.

A similar potential, though other emanations, would have to be applied to Shargash, and possibly to the other (lost?) planetary sons (due to Umath's invasion of the Sky World).

[scott-martin]

3 hours ago, Joerg said:

eight is a significant number in the Mostali cosmogeny. And coincidentally there were eight planetary sons of Yelm

Love it.

Have we ever seen Mostalists interact directly with (other) dragon forces?

[JRE]

From the top of my head, both mostali and the Inhuman King were part of the First Council. And both the EWF, non-draconic orlanthi and mostali were on the same side in the Machine Wars. We know the mostali backstabbed the orlanthi at the end, but we do not know how they dealt with the EWF.

[mfbrandi]

10 hours ago, Joerg said:

Basically, the Pseudocosmic Egg is a hatchling universe, one to be spawned into the Void outside of Glorantha.

• So are universes — like tribbles — born pregnant?
• What is “pseudo” about a pseudocosmic egg?

Tell us more!

I think we can at least take a stab at the identity of the soul of the current universe.

Spoiler

Mother Krarsht’s karaoke:

      I was doing time
      In the universal mind
      I was feeling fine
      I was turning keys
      I was setting people free
      I was doing all right

[jajagappa]

9 hours ago, scott-martin said:

Have we ever seen Mostalists interact directly with (other) dragon forces?

There's an interesting convergence in Imther. Giant Top (the central, greatest mountain) is one of the Sacred Storm Mountains. It is also Denera Dala Vo, an ancient Mostali complex built within the mountains. AND, it is also Long Mountain Dragon where Ingolf had a famous draconic school. 

What we are unaware of is how the Mostali interacted with the draconic forces there. Were the dragons responsible for the great Krarsht incursion that radiated out from beneath Tork? Or did the dragons come there because it provided proximate access to the Void? Were the dragons drawn to the Mostali's Forge, or was the Mostali's Forge the belly of Long Mountain Dragon? These are questions that remain unanswered as the Hero Wars begin (though ones I'm playing with as longer-term themes in the region).

[Joerg]

There is also Ormsfang as one of the Greatway Mountains.

[mfbrandi]

23 hours ago, scott-martin said:

Have we ever seen Mostalists interact directly with (other) dragon forces?

emphasis mine

This has me picturing the Cosmic Dragon/Ouroboros as a clockwork-powered Meccano mechanism wrapped around Orxili/the Cosmic egg.

Then the Grand Ancestral dragon hatched from the Cosmic Egg — Chaos acted upon by the Cosmic Dragon (with CD already knowing to prune like a gardener but using steel shears) — would be the blending of Mechanist/Makerish early dragon–technology with Shaper/Growerish Chaos–nature. Compromise before the creation of the universe-as-we-know-it. The wedding of all essential parts.

The halves of its egg are [insidedead Mechanism] and [outsideliving Chaos] ( … I am making this up, it may not be true …), flipping the positions — but not, it seems, the functions — of Cosmic Dragon and Orxili. Note though their essential sameness as two halves of an eggshell.

Trickster jokes to Windbag, “It is not breath that makes dead matter live. Nothing makes dead matter live.”

How now do we feel about Sun Spider = Cosmos and Wakboth = Dragon? You could go for a flip-flop of rôles once the universe is created, or instead go for Wakboth as Cosmos freaking out about Chaos and sprouting “chaotic features,” but then what does Spider eats Devil tell you? Symbolically, that great undecidable — Kajabor/Void vs. Wakboth/Corruption on the Net — seems to matter. But perhaps it is a mistake to think of anything manifesting in the world and not embodying and both.

Do we say straightforwardly that Krarsht = Orxili? Do we say that Krarsht is one of the bits of Orxili pruned off by the Cosmic Dragon: Krarsht is to Orxili as krarshtkid is to Krarsht? Is it that Orxili/Krarsht splits like a hologram — the prunings resemble the trunk — so that we shouldn’t be detained by such philosophical niceties? (Parfit’s people splitting like amoebas — and Chaos gods are people, too.) It would be just like our Beloved Mother to survive her own death and transformation and to be fully present in each of her “children”. (Or leaving the genders per another mythos: Orxili = the father, the Grand Ancestral Dragon = the son, and Krarsht = the holy ghost. Perhaps.)

14 hours ago, jajagappa said:

Were the dragons responsible for the great Krarsht incursion that radiated out from beneath Tork?

As before, so again? As above, so below? So we would expect dragons to be both responsible for Krarsht outbreaks and to be involved in wrestling with some of the results (and guarding others) … perhaps. Do the dragons view Chaos as an adversary but essential, or are they beyond viewing Chaos as enemy — though gods and mortals attempting to relate draconic myth have difficulty grasping this? Or is it that the dragons who remain are those who haven’t fully appreciated the rôle of Chaos — the length of the Cosmic cycle is determined by the dimness of the dimmest dragon?

Or perhaps we should bin the notion of the great clockwork dragon … but not yet, not yet.°

———————————————————————————————————————————

° In which scenario, the organic appearance of Krarsht is an illusion: the tentacles are bits of Cosmos “reacting” to the Void, and cutting them away (to create “krarshtkids”) leaves Krarsht untouched. Krarsht as the great computer network made of tubes of nothing, as imponderable a bit of cold outside “tech” as you’ll find in the lozenge.

Nothing gibbering about in the tunnels is of Krarsht — only the voids in the rock are Her — but there is no percentage in it for the Waiting Mouth to let this be known (especially not to that degenerate freemasonry of crazy cultists who often don’t even know the name She doesn’t even have). The combined and of Krarsht are the secret of instantaneous communication: motion without motion; actionless action; nothing … happened.

This draws the dwarves who struggle to reconcile their worship of Stasis with their organic selves and their development over time of new things. But if they get too close to the secrets of the Void Mother, they turn inside-out (I blame Suzette Haden Elgin) and become mad tentacled mouths. Thus — in true Gloranthan fashion — the war of dwarf on krarshtkid is an internal struggle, a most uncivil civil war. But that is not something to tell outsiders, and whether and how to seek Change without Change is a powerful driver of embarrassing faction formation. Did anyone tell them that a step sideways would take them to realms where the local symbol of Chaos points in eight directions at once?

[Apologies for the even more than usually rambling improv, but I fear that attempting to polish this turd would just result in an ugly smear.]

Edited August 7, 2023 by mfbrandi
en dash

[JRE]

The Krarsht cult, as presented in cults of Terror, has nothing to do with the Great Maw herself. It is just a human construct, using the magic power that Krarsht gives away freely, intended mainly for her kids but hijacked by selfish humans. That is why one of the most alien deities gets one of the more organized and widespread cults.

Devourer is the shadow of both Grower and Maker, and it shows they are not really  (more like two sides of the same force, Creation) opposed because they share a common enemy, wishing to unmake both, so it will be undone too at the end. However True Dragons are, at their core, an equilibrium between all three, although expressed in the duality Creation and Destruction. Their long periods of inactivity and their philosophical efforts may make mortals forget how intrinsic Destruction / Devouring is for a True Dragon. 

But does the Great Maw exist and plot separately, or is it just the Great Maw of a cosmic Dragon, balancing Creation with Destruction, and any intention or long term plans is just a projection from worshippers that ignore they just worship part of a Dragon, just doing what comes naturally.

In the same way a Dragon dreams are still Dragons, a Maw dreams are all small mouths. 

[jajagappa]

38 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

Or perhaps we should bin the notion of the great clockwork dragon … but not yet, not yet.

Makes me think of Gregory Maguire's Out of Oz work with its clockwork Time Dragon slowing winding down.

42 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

The combined and of Krarsht are the secret of instantaneous communication: motion without motion; actionless action; nothing … happened.

Now that could be an interesting scenario... 🤔

 

 

[Akhôrahil]

2 hours ago, JRE said:

Devourer is the shadow of both Grower and Maker, and it shows they are not really  (more like two sides of the same force, Creation) opposed because they share a common enemy, wishing to unmake both, so it will be undone too at the end. However True Dragons are, at their core, an equilibrium between all three

I'm also in favor of the Lords of Terror trinity:

"The Great Goddess as Glorantha created the world; as Arachne Solara She preserves it; and as Krarsht the Devourer She will destroy it at the end of Time."

[Akhôrahil]

I like this for Illumination as well. If you're saying Chaos isn't inherently destructive, you're plain deluding yourself. But if you embrace eventual destruction as part of the natural cycle...

[Eff]

On 8/4/2023 at 9:47 AM, scott-martin said:

Somewhere in the massive and long deferred take on Arachne Solara is a dissection of Greg's ambivalence (even antipathy) toward "mysticism" as we understand it around here, as opposed to this-worldly "paganisms" or "shamanisms." I think that shows up with the Wool Cloaks and other scene dressing. But some day, not yet!

Not a hard antipathy to notice! After all, mysticism quite easily accommodates/accommodated itself to the world of the clapboard churches. It's no great surprise that Arkat's journey involves moving from the mystically churchly towards the directly pagan. Historically suspect to trace the Grail back to Nodens, but emotionally satisfying. 

In that spirit: 

The dire warnings about failed mystics carry no intrinsic metaphysical component. Orthodox or heterodox, the only thing that will assuredly happen to you once you've intervened in the temporal world is the fruition of your actions. The warnings are thus the more valuable. 

[scott-martin]

1 hour ago, Eff said:

world of the clapboard churches . . . the mystically churchly

As someone who bears the stigmata of LHP/RHP confusion, I will always find the traces of Greg's occasional compass point dyslexia (east for west, existential death-of-god sorcerous theology for macrobiotic meditative practice) comforting. Much as the north mirrors the south in a minor key, the west and the east converge at the groovy Alan Watts high church rap session.

Why has bodhi arkat gone to his relative east? Why does bodhi harmast journey to his relative west? They're both looking for something they can't see themselves getting at home, an emerald city pivoting between the "evil" sisters at the solar extremes. Surrender Dorothy!

And bodhi arkat comes out of the sorcerous and secular west in response to a transcendental and gnostic revelation, a shared but rejected insight. We don't talk nearly enough about Vithelan interactions in the dawn age. Wonder why.
 

1 hour ago, Eff said:

the fruition of your actions

Love it. Everybody makes the decision to be born and then after that you're caught in the "mood" as it were, stuck in the web of interaction, trouble and desire. Flip the map, of course, and nobody gets out alive.

Edited August 9, 2023 by scott-martin
five to one baby and one is five

[mfbrandi]

On 7/25/2023 at 9:44 PM, scott-martin said:

What fell out of PA MAL(T) to construct (OM) PA LAM was of course 
What they incorporated into the stale (OM) PA LAM to get the world moving again was of course 

Seeing this die made me think again about your comment. You played on as the Futhark “T” — for Tiwaz and Týr. Experimentally, let us try: Pamalt = Týr.

Playfully: Fenrir = Fonrit = Ompalam. Fenrir bound by the gods; Ompalam held immobile by the slave chains he cannot — or will not — release. But was Chubby O tricked into it by a gesture of trust from Pamalt? Is what allowed Ompalam to get the world moving again a meal of Pamalt’s spear hand? [Chronology surely jumbled by me here.]

But the upward pointing spear/arrow is still a symbol of bondage. The world moves, but Ompalam does not. Slave god as unmoved mover slides without sliding into its rôle as heretic Malkioni fetish.

If was Pamalt’s spear hand, he is likely well rid of it — distanced from the neo-Nazis in their power rune T shirts. Ompalam introjects Pamalt-as-Power and truncated Pamalt is freed — personal liberation as irresponsibility; I am sure that is a theme around here. Perhaps we should really write Pamalt as a more tree-huggy — I mean, if you squint and in a poor light …

Is this roughly the kind of thing you had in mind? I appreciate that as I have presented it here, it does not rise to the heights of theory.

Spoiler

Apropos of nothing, in stumbling through this crackpot thing, I also noticed that the tapping rune ᛉ is “Z” for Zzabur and that the Prophecy of the Völva (not to be confused with the prophecy of the Volvo: “you will find that your lights are still on”) has:

• In the east she sat, the old one, in Iron Wood, and bred there the broods of Fenrir. There will come from them all one of that number to be a moon-snatcher in troll’s skin. It sates itself on the life-blood of fated men, paints the powers’ homes with crimson gore. Black become the sun’s beams in the summers that follow, weathers all treacherous. Do you still seek to know? And what?