Your Dumbest Theory

[JRE]

I confess I have never given much thought to Pamaltela. But I always assumed the big difference was that Pamalt was alive, and Pamalt, like Genert, was not only an Earth deity, but also a people deity. Pamalt's victory means that he showed mortals could do what gods could not, and that they did not really those deities, including Pamalt, that much. Genertela was saved by the sacrifice of a few gods (LBQ, Yelm's pardoning his enemies, the dragon emperor recreating the world, even Malkion or Zzabur protecting their people).

Pamalt rune, the upward pointing spear, shows that the united people can beat those interfering deities, and that is against whom the spear is pointed. The chaos invaders, but also the northern invaders, the southern ones, and if necessary, the elves and the people from the sea. People discount the Doraddi by their disunion and apparent lack of ambition. They forget they always join together under Pamalt when it is needed and they relax because so far they have always beaten their foes at the end.

[Akhôrahil]

2 hours ago, JRE said:

Genertela was saved by the sacrifice of a few gods (LBQ, Yelm's pardoning his enemies, the dragon emperor recreating the world, even Malkion or Zzabur protecting their people).

As a consequence, Genertela is more of a patchwork. There's (presumably) no "I fought we won" in Pamaltela, and things never reached quite the same utterly apocalyptic state as in Genertela during the Greater Darkness?

[mfbrandi]

3 hours ago, JRE said:

Pamalt, like Genert, was not only an Earth deity, but also a people deity. Pamalt's victory means that he showed mortals could do what gods could not

Quote

[Pamalt’s] duties encompass those which keep the land alive, and his worshippers are devoted to aiding their god, accepting their share of his responsibilities in their own worlds. They are the working people of the plains.
— CoR Prosopaedia, p. 97

Does that mean your idea of the worshippers’ share of Pamalt’s duties/responsibilities/work is all of it? I like it!

Of course, Zzabur might claim to be a human and not a god — then the issue is not gods vs. the people but one snooty wizard vs. the working class.

3 hours ago, JRE said:

they did not really [?????] those deities, including Pamalt, that much

Like, worship, recognise, respect, or … ?

Edited August 10, 2023 by mfbrandi
Zzabur

[Joerg]

26 minutes ago, Akhôrahil said:

As a consequence, Genertela is more of a patchwork. There's (presumably) no "I fought we won" in Pamaltela, and things never reached quite the same utterly apocalyptic state as in Genertela during the Greater Darkness?

In Pamaltela, there is Pamalt's Necklace. I don't recall any mention of actions of mortals in crucial activities in the later part of the Gods War. There is a portion of the Yellow Elf jungles that did not even notice the Gods War (although I take that to be a bit of an exaggeration, or otherwise a disconnection from the world as a Hidden Castle, or a mass memory loss).

There was an unholy alliance between (some of) the Artmali and Chaos that is at best hinted at but never going to any detail. Not even in the Artmali uprising prophecy/arc inthe Guide.

[Akhôrahil]

50 minutes ago, Joerg said:

There was an unholy alliance between (some of) the Artmali and Chaos that is at best hinted at but never going to any detail. Not even in the Artmali uprising prophecy/arc inthe Guide.

I think this adds some nice tension to the Hero Wars era Artmali uprising and New Artmali Empire. Yes, it's good if they can escape slavery, but I really don't trust them not to backslide into Chaos stuff (as the Guide makes clear happens).

Edited August 10, 2023 by Akhôrahil

[mfbrandi]

9 minutes ago, Joerg said:

There is a portion of the Yellow Elf jungles that did not even notice the Gods War (although I take that to be a bit of an exaggeration, or otherwise a disconnection from the world as a Hidden Castle, or a mass memory loss).

Quote

However, the Myths are not objective reality, but subjective by their very nature. — GtG, p. 154

The Gods War is surely capital “M” myth, so what is wrong with Yellow Elves taking a “didn’t see it, mate; didn’t happen, or at least, not round here” stance, even from the orthodox POV? All myths are true, even the ones that say “nothing happened” — right?

If you want to go over to the dark side and deny the subjectivity of the Gods War, all heresies are welcome here.

[Any suggestion that I am just teasing in an attempt to draw out people’s notions of what it means to say “myth is subjective” is, of course …]

[Joerg]

4 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

The Gods War is surely capital “M” myth, so what is wrong with Yellow Elves taking a “didn’t see it, mate; didn’t happen, or at least, not round here” stance, even from the orthodox POV? All myths are true, even the ones that say “nothing happened” — right?

If you want to go over to the dark side and deny the subjectivity of the Gods War, all heresies are welcome here.

[Any suggestion that I am just teasing in an attempt to draw out people’s notions of what it means to say “myth is subjective” is, of course …]

It it was just the short-lived yellow elf males, I wouldn't be worried, but there are dryads and a great tree that might have noticed things like Flamal killed or the sun going AWOL before Time.

[radmonger]

8 minutes ago, Joerg said:

It it was just the short-lived yellow elf males, I wouldn't be worried, but there are dryads and a great tree that might have noticed things like Flamal killed or the sun going AWOL before Time.

Yelmalio is both the sun who didn't (quite) die, and also in some undefined sense an elf god. Are there yellow elves in Teshnos?

[mfbrandi]

1 minute ago, Joerg said:

there are dryads and a great tree that might have noticed things like Flamal killed or the sun going AWOL before Time

But if we lean into the subjectivity of the Gods War, isn’t it smart not to notice these things? If the sun only goes out — with all that means to plant life — if one perceives it as going out, then best to have a firm conviction that it is shining as brightly as ever and to continue to feel its warmth on one’s leaves and bark, no?

The Gods War is a crisis of faith — don’t have one and you’ll be fine.

[radmonger]

2 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

If the sun only goes out — with all that means to plant life — if one perceives it as going out,

Perhaps the subjectivity cuts the other way. If you die without sun, you can never experience a world without sunlight. So can never form a myth about it.

Perhaps there are some immortal beings who know the truth about how the Great Trees and surrounding jungles were replanted from grafts and seedlings in the early years ST. Perhaps some of them are even the same beings who plan the current Hero Wars reforestation projects.

But it would be virtually impossible to learn that from heroquesting in elf myth. because elf myth does not contain things outside elf experience.  You would have to hit a level of abstraction where you were identifying with a seed abandoned on the surface, struggling to maintain life.

For which, see my previous post.

 

[scott-martin]

18 minutes ago, Joerg said:

a great tree that might have noticed things like Flamal killed

IMG that part of the south (Falamalela) is really part of the eastern quadrant and so they have no sense of Flamal as a dying god . . . that cyclical mystery was expressed through aspects of the Errinoru imperial cult instead. Being an embyli means being innocent of death unless for some reason you stray too far from the jungle center to the periphery where the world breaks down and can see the horrible things for yourself like Siddhartha getting his eyeful of pain.

But then again I increasingly wonder whether the god at the center of the Doraddi cultural complex is really just a divergent form of the vegetative force, a tree that was cut down and became a spear that provides a mobile vertical feature in the otherwise undifferentiated veldt. (The stool is the spike.) The implications here for the historical rivalry between Pamalt and Falamal ecological blocs are pretty obvious and include the revelation that the Kresh movement is not necessarily a dramatic infiltration or subversion of Doraddi principles so much as a revival of ancient origins.

Something like this can be reconstituted in the north as well, maybe especially in the rice rites of the east where nobody has heard the news that the great god Genert is "dead." But this might be getting a tad esoteric.
 

[Joerg]

9 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

The implications here for the historical rivalry between Pamalt and Falamal ecological blocs are pretty obvious and include the revelation that the Kresh movement is not necessarily a dramatic infiltration or subversion of Doraddi principles so much as a revival of ancient origins.

There is a Pamalt that the aldryami love, and a lesser one (the one walking with the Doraddi) which is their enemy.

Up north, the distribution between Genert and Tada used two different names, down south both aspects have the same name.

[Scorus]

On 8/3/2023 at 5:52 PM, mfbrandi said:

 This set me thinking (the wise have stopped reading already):

The greatest compliment that anyone can give me is that something I said got them thinking! Thank you!

As a dedicated subjectivist that has spent way too many of my years thinking about time, I'm intrigued by your pictures. I would say that my viewpoint is a combination of the first (as mentally I'm still 12 even though my body tells me I'm several times that) and the third. There WAS an existential break point with the Great Compromise, one that forced a reconception of the "memories" of a pre-Dawn period just to preserve sanities, but that doesn't mean that there was no Y subjectivity axis in either existence.

The second is purely the result of limited thinking.

[Scorus]

Please delete...

Edited August 10, 2023 by Scorus
Inability to use the web

[Eff]

4 hours ago, Akhôrahil said:

I think this adds some nice tension to the Hero Wars era Artmali uprising and New Artmali Empire. Yes, it's good if they can escape slavery, but I really don't trust them not to backslide into Chaos stuff (as the Guide makes clear happens).

I don't think "what if slavery is better than freedom because the enslaved people are congenitally evil" adds much tension at all. 

[Akhôrahil]

3 hours ago, Eff said:

I don't think "what if slavery is better than freedom because the enslaved people are congenitally evil" adds much tension at all. 

Good thing that's not the argument, then!

[mfbrandi]

8 hours ago, scott-martin said:

they have no sense of Flamal as a dying god . . . that cyclical mystery

When I first thought about the murder and return of the sun, I thought of it as purely a myth of the daily cycle, but of course in some parts of the world, it is also a myth of the yearly cycle — sun, deciduous trees, the whole nine yards — and that is what gives it its apocalyptic flavour. If there are parts of Glorantha sufficiently like our tropics …

Spoiler

There are normally only two seasons in tropical climates, a wet (rainy/monsoon) season and a dry season. The annual temperature range in tropical climates is normally very small. Sunlight is intense in these climates.
— Wikipedia

… with no dark, cold season, then we can expect them not to have a myth of a period of extended darkness where the world seemed likely to end — i.e. not to have an aetiological myth of winter, not to have a “memory” of the Gods War, or to have a Gods War recast as waiting for the break of the monsoon. But in a jungle where it is warm and wet all the time … nada!

So jungle Aldryami (JAs) who say “gods war, you say — whassat then?” are unsurprising. We only tie ourselves in knots when we try to come up with the in-world explanation of why they are ignorant of the Gods War. (Although it is tempting just to have the JAs describe a year in the wet, wet jungle and then say, “See, no Gods War.” That is the stuff on which religious conversions turn, right? But it is not theoretical.)

But note that it is not especially a problem in their case, because we have the same problem explaining how the Genertelans do remember the Gods War: it is not an objective fact of history — at least, according to GtG holy writ, it is not — but we have trouble saying they just made it up to “explain” the since-Time objective facts. We want it to be real but not objectively real, but that is a hard to — which is not to say you guys don’t have a dozen good ways to do it.

What will we do when a real philosopher of religion turns up? I think I will just run and hide, and if found deny all knowledge and responsibility.

Edited August 10, 2023 by mfbrandi
is —> are

[mfbrandi]

7 hours ago, radmonger said:

Perhaps the subjectivity cuts the other way. If you die without sun, you can never experience a world without sunlight. So can never form a myth about it.

And apparently some jungle Aldryami did not form any such myth. This does not surprise them:

    If the sun had gone out, the jungles would be dead.
    The jungles are not dead.
    Therefore the sun did not go out.

[JRE]

20 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Like, worship, recognise, respect, or … ?

Need. The missing word is need. They are helpful, but Doraddi, because this is Doraddi specific, can manage without them. 

[Eff]

1. There is a reasonably effective identifier for "Lunar converts"/"victims of Lunar corruption" among spiritual beings: 

A splash of red where it typically wouldn't be. 

2. The most important law of magic in some Gloranthas is that if you have an idea that in some way resembles real-world science, Mostal sends an ur-gremlin to render this idea impossible. 

[Joerg]

1 hour ago, Eff said:

2. The most important law of magic in some Gloranthas is that if you have an idea that in some way resembles real-world science, Mostal sends an ur-gremlin to render this idea impossible. 

Mostal is dead.

[Eff]

1 hour ago, Joerg said:

Mostal is dead.

That's what they all say when their rudimentary heat pump with elementals as the working fluid refuses to function. "Mostal is dead!"

[Joerg]

Also, impossible ideas are only slightly harder to implement by heroquesting than difficult ones.

[scott-martin]

I feel like the linkages between the mostal system and the impossible are providing protective cover for the part about the red stripe . . . like a gigantic floating cement block distracting us from the dazzle boats riding the surge. But I am not one to interfere with another magician's mirror array by choice so let's roll the big block.

When I hear the word "impossible" in a Gloranthan context I naturally think of the book that helped the proto god learners dream more than previously imagined in their philosophy, the book inhabited by the harmless and corrosive little dancing man and pictures of places that cannot exist. And it strikes me that the dwarf way was originally much more diverse, with heresies (from the middle stygian, "hrestelechies") completely erased from human records nowadays. What we have now is the streamlined version shorn of logical contradictions, paradoxes, bad plumbing. 

But being Glorantha all these crudescences had to go somewhere and that is the plane of things that no longer exist but can still be interacted with if you have the right symbolic orientation. The dwarves closed a lot of doors. The ghost windows swing open like in a Kate Bush video. Go tell the [cybernaut] Thamus the great god mostal is [dead].

Wasn't there something about the lunar way in here somewhere?

[mfbrandi]

34 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

the book that helped the proto god learners dream more than previously imagined in their philosophy

But surely the book was not Hamlet.

• There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

That is possibly — only possibly — the most unGloranthan thing ever said: it has not been dreamed, told, seen, or inscribed, but nonetheless it is. Be careful on your heroquest: you know all the story variations, but the unknown unknowns are lurking out there and keen to impale you on spikes of objective reality.

Another team is lost, harsh words are spoken, and the GLs conclude that it is not just someone “dreaming harder” than them, nor the return of the repressed: there is something out there in no mind, no dream, no story — the “dark matter” of their playground is hostile … and it has teeth.

They review their textbooks looking for clues:

• The Dream Master
• The Interpretation of Dreams
• The Lathe of Heaven
• If on a winter’s night a traveller
• “Solid Objects”
• Roadside Picnic
• Lost Futures
• “Dead in Irons”

“How in all the hells did this stuff get on our shelves?”

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

The above is just a little riff that is probably going nowhere. We have gotten used to:

• prayer-powered gods (the tail wagging the dog)
• stories conformable to our wills for fun and bloody profit (consensus reality)

But aren’t there powerful things no one is feeding POW to out there in the deep end of what was supposed to be subjective reality — nightmares that are no one’s dreams, whose untold stories would stubbornly refuse to be re-written — things so inimical and alien that not even the most self-tortured “chaos fiend” could dream them up or even see them clearly?

Kicking against the solipsistic pricks and the pop-culture take on George Berkeley.

Spoiler

And the Void whispers, “And fewer things, too, Horatio. That does not exist, nor that, and no, not that, either.”