Your Dumbest Theory

[mfbrandi]

The Meaning of Living Stone: Three Tales

1. In the past, all rock was molten and mobile and plants and animals were impossible. Now, the surface rock is cool and solid; it breaks into dust and steam becomes water. Plants grow everywhere, rats and bugs scurry, and fish gape stupidly.
    
2. In the past, machines could replicate themselves, but the world was broken and the knack lost. The Mostali have to resort to Growerish tricks to replenish the workforce. It is not the foulness of their food that causes the dwarfs’ disgust, it is the indignity of having to eat.
    
3. In the past, rock was alive as today a weed or a worm is alive, but murder put an end to this exotic biology. Wholesome matter can only be made to live by infusing it with tenuous soul or spirit. This preposterous story was doubtless dreamed up by some grandchild of Ernalda.

Edited January 31 by mfbrandi
line breaks

[mfbrandi]

1 hour ago, scott-martin said:

We should probably take this to #theories but if you take Greg's early encounter with Alan Stivell records seriously enough to read “Brithini” as a corruption of “Brezhon ys”  or “Breton île” (see also “Prydain”) then the obvious derivation of “Vadel” is “Gwad île,” of or originating on the island of blood.

Well, I guess it has all been said before: plonk America (or some part of it) between Britain in the West and Asia in the East and away you go. Empiricist naval empire of the West, now fallen — do they mean us? They surely do.

[Rodney Dangerduck]

The "fact" that the King of Sartar must marry the Feathered Horse Queen is, in effect, a mythical forgery, faked by Arkati/Ernaldan heroquesters.

Much like the Donation of Constantine was forged by the Church to give it power over the temporal rulers of western Europe, this was forged to give Ernalda and the FHQ power over the rulers of Sartar.

[jajagappa]

1 hour ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

The "fact" that the King of Sartar must marry the Feathered Horse Queen is, in effect, a mythical forgery, faked by Arkati/Ernaldan heroquesters.

But blessed by the dragonewts nonetheless! Maybe the Ducks were the "Arkati"?

[mfbrandi]

Too Many Limbs, or ‘The Dark Side of Arachne Solara’

Erol’s quest for camels led me to this:

• The name Solifugae derives from Latin, and means “those that flee from the sun” … common names include camel spider, wind scorpion, scorpion carrier, jerrymunglum, sun scorpion, and sun spider. In southern Africa, they are known by a host of names, including red romans … and baardskeerders (“beard cutters”)
  — Wikipedia, Solifugae [emphasis mine]

This plays nicely with the Lunar claim that the Goddess has a special relationship with AS and her child Time, for what are the Lunars but Red Romans, and has the Goddess not trimmed the beard of the Sun by installing Moonson as the Sun-on-earth? And if the large slit-faced bat is the natural predator of the solifuge, all the more delight in enslaving it and painting it red (which drove it mad).

And if Arachne Solara sometimes seems to have ten limbs, rather than indicating centaurism, mightn’t that be the natural condition of a solifuge?

• Although the Solifugae appear to have five pairs of legs, only the hind four pairs are true legs.
  — ibid

Of course, if AS is the imposter she is beginning to seem — sun spiders are arachnids but they are not spiders — this has consequences:

• no venom
• no silk
• no web

Maybe this explains why she is so pally with Trickster and why goddess of the loom Ernalda “helped her weave the Great Compromise” (Glorantha Sourcebook, p. 90) — she could hardly have done it on her own. We had long suspected the Compromise was a con trick and a stitch-up, right?

The solifuge theory fits nicely with Argrath’s “failed” Ritual of the Net in Argrath and the Devil:

• They are aggressive hunters and voracious opportunistic feeders, and have been recorded as feeding on snakes … Prey is located with the pedipalps and killed and cut into pieces
  — ibid

The “big man” takes the credit, but that is business as usual:

• And he killed the serpent which had wrapped itself about him and wounded him. And then with the Unbreakable Sword he cut the corpse into pieces
  — King of Sartar, (p. 199 — 2nd edition web PDF)

So if “Arachne Solara” is a non-spider stooge of the Compromise’s true architects and those who enthusiastically amend it — and not Glorantha come again to save us — whose web binds the universe together? The smug acolytes of the Loom Goddess and the Mistress of Time will have their ideas, there being many ways to spin this (sorry!), but we all suspect the truth, don’t we? Nothing holds the universe together, the Voids in the world, the lozenge’s ansible — .

Although, some ask us to note that (10+6)÷2=8. Ignore them. They are likely in the pay of Buserian.

[scott-martin]

On 1/31/2024 at 7:55 AM, mfbrandi said:

Wholesome matter can only be made to live by infusing it with tenuous soul or spirit.

This is really good because it uh grounds them in their original role as a competing earth ecology, neither vegetable nor ernaldoid but maintaining access to gnomes. The key concept is that is not really a womb or hourglass figure but food . . . eater and eaten.

This in turn is why when you flip the rune  is also called hunger, appetite without access to food. Note that trolls will famously eat animals, vegetables or even inert matter, dwarves and dwarf stuff. Part of the secret work of the Machine is to convert as much as they can to Stone that resists falling into the shameful and embarrassing food cycle . . . they find the notion of becoming food for worms or worse terrifying. Thus the canning.
 

1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

sun spider

Putting the Solara back on it!

[mfbrandi]

1 hour ago, scott-martin said:

Part of the secret work of the Machine is to convert as much as they can to Stone that resists falling into the shameful and embarrassing food cycle . . . they find the notion of becoming food for worms or worse terrifying.

“Or worse” … but certain heretical factions maintain that Voids are necessary to complete the conversion to computronium, so some stone must be tapped down beyond dust to Nothing. Scary? If anyone can build coping mechanisms, surely the dwarfs can.

But perhaps for the dwarfs complete sublimation is nowhere near as scary as being recycled via a bag of squishy organs — ech! Thus unlikely allies are at least possible for the dwarfs.

2 hours ago, scott-martin said:

Putting the Solara back on it!

But also … wind scorpions!

Soon the “Great Compromise” will be revealed as mere Potemkin cosmology.

[mfbrandi]

15 hours ago, scott-martin said:

In archaic Holy Country materials … “Strength” gets briefly assigned to a three-legged rune that looks like the modern Change. This attribution of course went away sometime before RQ2 … By mid-1980 the triskelion has shifted to clear association with movement and moving matter

The problem with has always been where to put it: how can Power be a power rune? But then again if it isn’t, what can be? Although power and force are different ideas, we all suspect that the Shargash Lambda is merely a degenerate or Laconic expression of Power, don’t we?

“Truth” has connotations of security and via Proto-Indo-European — how speculatively? — firmness, solidity, and even tree. is firm, solid, planted — a tree. I like it. Now spin it and perhaps its straight arms merely seem to bend — .  puts its arms down to provide itself with a spear point and we have . A haunting by MKG’s truth-force?

As we have noted before, the three lines of are easily reconfigured into , and they are both expressions of what is rather than what is not — Ø or . is also Delta, which can stand for difference (connoting ) and the distance from epicentre to hypocentre — which brings us back to Force and the violence of the Earth gods.

[mfbrandi]

As I write this, Sense Chaos? is the fresh hotness. It seems to present game-mechanical difficulties, but perhaps we can cut the knot:

• If a Storm Bully rolls ≤ her sense chaos percentage, her Spidey-sense tingles.
  There are no false positives because Chaos is always and everywhere “present”.

And anyway, every Storm Bully carries Chaos around with her at all times, clutched in a death grip. Without Chaos, she would be Nothing — and that is just what she fears.

[mfbrandi]

So — being in the thread that we are — let us say that the Goddess (a high-class broad) is married to the Sun (Vivasvant/Yelm — poe-tay-toe/poe-tah-toe) but she considers him beneath her because he is mutilated and mortal or black (having, perhaps, burned himself). She leaves him but leaves behind a double:

• The double is still [in the Harivamsha] called the savarna (the female of-the-same-kind), as in the earlier versions, but she is also the chaya (shadow or reflection) and sadrisha (the look-alike). More important, there is real ambiguity now about the person whom the Shadow looks like: Samjna [the fleeing Goddess] or the Sun? Samjna … perceives herself as literally of a different class from that of her husband. We have noted that varna [colour] may mean ‘kind’ in the sense of mortal vs. immortal and might, therefore, be translated as ‘class’.
  — Wendy Doniger,
  — Saranyu/Samjna: The Sun and the Shadow (On Hinduism, pp. 275–276)

Although the Goddess initially flees, there is a later sexual encounter between the Sun-as-stallion and the Goddess-as-mare — after the Sun has been smartened-up by being trimmed on the lathe to remove “excessive fiery energy” (he was a hairy Sun).

Texts differ as to whether the Shadow (Yaska and the Brihaddevata) or the pre-flight Goddess (the Harivamsha) was the mother of Manu. Or should we say Murharzarm? Or even Daka Fal/Malkion? The murders of Sun and son are seemingly interchangeable. Sex = death, so — Storm having “proven” the mortality of the Sun — no wonder the Sun is the ancestor of mortal humanity (in this mash-up).

Is all this the key to the La-ungariant Ernalda/Dendara confusion? If so which is the Goddess and which her Shadow? Who is Orlanth really shacked up with, the original or the clone tailored to suit a low-class husband? Even if this were resolved to the satisfaction of disinterested scholars, presumably Dragon Pass and Peloria would continue to disagree (Prosopædia, CHA4042, p. 74).

Perhaps any Sun worshippers who still favour blondes and sneer at dark-skinned, working-class Lodril should think again.

Spoiler

Vivasvant. Vivamort. Did this name for the vampire god — ironically! — originate as a slur on Yelm among the faction of Ernalda worshippers who hold her to be the Goddess who rejected the Sun and did not return to him? Connected to Kazkurtum “all the terrible things which could not be perceived by the emperor of excellence, perfection, and completeness” (Prosopædia, CHA4042, p. 71)?

[davecake]

On 2/10/2024 at 9:40 PM, mfbrandi said:

The problem with has always been where to put it: how can Power be a power rune? But then again if it isn’t, what can be? Although power and force are different ideas, we all suspect that the Shargash Lambda is merely a degenerate or Laconic expression of Power, don’t we?

So the Power rune is clearly, IMO, a condition rune, like Mastery. Or rather, it’s clearly like Mastery, and we now classify Mastery as that, so Power must be too. 

The God Learners got it wrong, they think the Power Rune is just a variant Mastery Rune with Earth, but we all know they don’t understand Pamalt. Power is as much about Earth as Mastery is about Storm - they associate in the person of the ruling god, but not by intrinsic nature. The (very God Learner indeed) Earth Goddess book says Power isn’t real at all, just a funny word for Earth and Mastery. But that’s just the sort of thinking that led to the Six Legged Empire getting their butts whipped. 

I think the Power rune can implies the method of rulership of Pamalt. Pamalt does not rule simply by asserting himself as the rightfully most powerful (the Mastery way) by either unchanging rule (Stasis, the Yelm way, never truly changing, only temporarily faltering) or asserting their right to claim power over others (Movement, the Orlanth way, always open to change just Orlanth winning). Pamalt rules by continually being part of the right solution, his power as Earth King makes him always part of the Council, but what makes him the god of Power is that the Council chooses not a person, but a solution - but Pamala is always part of the solution, never part of the mistakes.

The real significance of Pamalt having Power is that because Pamalt never died, and always has been the ruler, Power is the Golden Age, pre-Darkness, way of rulership. Once everyone has spoken, everyone sees what the right thing to do is. The Power rune is rulership by consensus, by the person understood to be the right leader leading. Mastery is the post-Lesser Darkness way of rulership - there is disagreement about leadership, so it must be settled by some means or other. A Doraddi Chief only ever has power contingent on the approval of the tribe*, it ultimately comes neither from lineage or his personal authority, but by continuing support that he is the Right Chieftain. 

Graphically, it is related to Harmony - three lines - but representing a community not simply existing together (three lines separately) but actively working as one (the different parts of the community all acting in concert), the three lines of harmony leaning together. It can be seen as the spear, with the community strength behind it, but I think that’s another God Learner mistake. 

But it is also the magic mountain that Pamalt sits atop, the mountain built by the community members and representing them all, but that would not exist without Pamalt. Pamalt is not the One like Yelm or first among the Many like Orlanth, he brings the Many together as a bigger One than before. The Mountain is just the macro cosmic representation, though, it is also the tripod stool that the chief sits upon, three individual lines making a greater thing that supports what could not happen before. And where Force is raw and unsupported, a point with no stability, Power is the same Force but stable. 
So, to truly understand Power - stop seeing it in 2D, it’s taking the three sticks of Harmony and using it to build a tripod in 3D!

On 2/10/2024 at 9:40 PM, mfbrandi said:

puts its arms down to provide itself with a spear point and we have . A haunting by MKG’s truth-force?

This also has an important secret revealed - Mastery does not care if you can prove you represent the Truth, both Yelm and Orlanth represent their own truth and don’t care if you share it as long you obey it, but building power through getting people to share the consensus must be built from shared Truth. To the Doraddi, Truth is the stool of Pamala seen from above (the view of Cronisper) or below (the view of Yanmorla), the two gods who unite Above and Below, divine and mortal. The union of Cronisper and Yanmorla is the union of spirit and divine (as symbolised by the staff of Cronisper too), but this essential primal esoteric secret must be recreated in the world by the exoteric work of coming together to maintain the ideal world by maintaining the right society. The idea that this work only seems like building the symbols and mechanisms of power, but is really about making Truth, is a cool secret that I’m sure gets revealed with a dramatic upturning of the stool of the chief in some Pamaltelan initiation ritual, maybe several.

The Law rune is a different thing. It is the three sticks of Truth as a flat thing, the things as they were and will be. Power is not passive Truth, simply observing what is and using it. Power is building a new thing made of Truth, a society built on truths about the world, a magical creation that shows Truth may be used in new ways through insight (and the gods/spirits are people that can learn and gain insights about truth and so change the world, not inert descriptions of dead power like the sorcerers say). The Six Legged Empire thought they could learn all the facts about the world, and so know truth. But Hon Hoolbiktu showed that if you can make the spirits and gods and shamans and people see a different way of Truth, maybe some build a new understanding of Truth, and maybe their silly hoofed animals can not survive in the Truth of the plains like they through. They say three points define a plane -three points sounds like Bolongo to me! 

* ok continuing approval of the tribe means ‘approval of the rich old women’, but that just makes sense - add the rich old women headed households together, and that is the people. And many kingships have rules to make it harder to remove the king, sometimes very hard, but that that’s just a matter of local legislative ordinances and historical idiosyncracies, not a lofty matter of mythic patterns like we are discussing here. *waves hand dismissively*

Cynics might also say that ‘the chief is always right, and always represents the Right Path’ is achieved by just removing any chief who makes a decision that doesn’t seem defendably the right one. Eh, no one said the mythic truth is the whole truth. It’s just like how the chieftain is always Orlanth leading the tribe to victory until he isn’t, or the Imperator is always the perfect and Just representative of Yelm until he isn’t. The biggest practical difference is that it is common for there to be no clear consensus replacement for a Doraddi king for some time. And for more prolonged paralyses of power while kings try to manipulate a group into consensus (which may sometimes look like prolonged dickering or gripe sessions to outsiders). But once a big powerful group like the Arbennan Confederation) emerges as a real power that all its members believe is needed, there is a lot of pressure for everyone to keep it conceptually in existence.

[scott-martin]

8 hours ago, davecake said:

dramatic upturning of the stool

This entire post is one for the record books but I only have time to tease out one proof point.




(In the north we may have instead.)
 

[mfbrandi]

8 hours ago, davecake said:

So, to truly understand Power - stop seeing it in 2D,
it’s taking the three sticks of Harmony and using it to build a tripod in 3D

is your tripod in plan view. Painful to sit on, however.

is a three-legged stool destabilised by removal of one leg.

Look at all the runic goodness here:

[mfbrandi]

Diseased minds think alike, it seems, @scott-martin. 😉

And a callback for good measure.

[davecake]

11 hours ago, scott-martin said:

In the north we may have instead.

Just noting that the opposite of is of course, and one of the few deities associated with the Fate rune is Artmal. And in the Pamaltelan myth cycle, the two contrasting styles of leadership (corresponding to Yelm and Orlanth in the North) are Artmal and Pamalt (though we don’t really have the Artmal side of the story). I’ve kind of taken this to imply the Artmali have a strong emphasis on prophecy (and the deep secrets of Annilla etc) and in their version the good ruler knows the deep magic secrets unknown to others. The imagery probably isn’t seen as Arachne Solara’s web, but two interlocking Truth runes - the Truth of the world that is known, and the secret Truth of the world to come. This contrasts to Pamalt, whose rulership is consensus building, so his Truth is not hidden but shared, it is the Truth of the eternal present of us together, and is discovered not by prophecy but by asking others their Truth. So Pamalt is by contrast associated with Luck, but Power (three legs not two) is more than luck, by bringing everyone into the consensus/ the Necklace, Luck ceases to control us, because bad luck for one of us is good luck for another. 

Not that Arachne Solara’s web should be unknown in Pamaltela, but it seems not to be as known. We know the Sunstop is a big deal there too. And there are Aranea worshippers there, but AFAIK not the spooky special Cragspider kind, just spider fans. 

[mfbrandi]

5 hours ago, davecake said:

Fate … two interlocking Truth runes —
the Truth of the world that is known, and
the secret Truth of the world to come

Could be, or it is another attempt to render motion blur in static form: Fate is the Truth as it rolls over us leaving only bonemeal and meat paste — Rota Fortunae — because Fate and Luck are the same. Fate is capricious. Truth is arbitrary. What is is accidental.

Spoiler

These might be taken to indicate the inexorability () of Fate as it rolls () over us. And we know what else has six legs. is an expression of , after all.

The rapture = the upload = oblivion. 🎼 We’re on a road to nowhere … 🎶 The future is known (if sometimes feared); it is the past which is a mystery.

Edited February 15 by mfbrandi
clarification

[Joerg]

16 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

Could be, or it is another attempt to render motion blur in static form: Fate is the Truth as it rolls over us leaving only bonemeal and meat paste — Rota Fortunae — because Fate and Luck are the same. Fate is capricious. Truth is arbitrary. What is is accidental.

  Hide contents

 

The understanding of Luck probably depends on your linguistic background.

In German language, Luck ("Glück") is always fortunate. "Bad Luck" is not a term in German, the phrase would be similar to "dry water". There is "Unglück", which doesn't mean "Bad Luck" but rather catastrophe or bad accident - the German word for that is "Pech" - a word that also means pitch, possibly associated with not-luck in the meaning of the bad stuff that the devils shovel with their forks in Hell sticking to someone. (Ok, there is "unglücklich" in the meaning of "unlucky", but that English language term in itself implies that luck is something positive.)

In French, Luck translates as "chance", a term that is neutral in itself, requiring a "bonne chance" as a blessing rather than the "lots of luck" German term "Viel Glück" which does not mean we wish each other a very randomized day.

English, inheriting from both these languages, sits somewhere in between.

French "chance" implies randomness, but there is a Gloranthan rune for that already: Disorder.

 

Fate on the other hand is a pre-determined outcome. In Greek myth, none of the deities can change a fate once it is assigned. Some mortal heroes (like the demigod Achilles) get to choose their fate, gods never do.

This does sound a lot like the Cosmic Compromise that bars the deities from exerting Free Will upon the World of Time or the Godtime following the Greater Darkness. Sending city-uprooting divine boars like Gouger in retribution is within the response patterns to mortal worship and willful negligence thereof.

leo.org offers a lot of alternate terms for the German translation of Fate (Schicksal), including fortune, lot, luck, destiny, doom.

Fate is tied to the concept of Free Will, something that moral philosophers (and jurisdiction) rave about and modern physicists like Sabine Hossenfelder cannot accommodate in their deterministic world view. But hey, we aren't discussing the real world here, but our fairy playground Glorantha, and in at least one important approach by Greg on the topic of heroquesting involves the abilities of mortal heroes to spend a currency called Free Will on imprinting themselves or their feats onto Godtime and the Hero Planes. Exchanging it for Fate, I suppose?

People can bind themselves to Fate - like Argrath swearing upon the "Styx" to tear down that Red Moon (or perish trying). (In RuneQuest terms, he acquires a surefire passion, possibly somewhat re-usable in heroquesting ventures, and possibly a slot or three of imprinting his Other Side actions onto Godtime.) Other people are born into a fate, like Jar-eel (who still has to work on achieving it).

Fate might be related to Truth and geases. A geas taken is a Fate to fulfill, an obligation waiting to be broken. While unbroken, Truth stands upright, when broken, it is overlayed by its mirror image (on a horizontal line through the junction), resulting in the Fate Rune.

 

Luck is a portion of Fate. As far as I am concerned, one resulting in good outcomes rather than doom. Not only did the people hiding beneath the city gate of Runegate escape being devoured by the Bat, they also seem to have escaped madness despite witnessing that horror.

[mfbrandi]

9 hours ago, Joerg said:

The understanding of Luck probably depends on your linguistic background.

• Diese Stadt hat mich belehrt,
  Paradies und Hölle
  können eine Stadt sein.
  Für die Mittellosen
  ist das Paradies die Hölle.
  — Bertolt Brecht, Hollywood Elegy #4

Luck and Fate can be one goddess — (Atrox) Fortuna, Automatia — and thesethe spokes of her wheel.

[mfbrandi]

1 hour ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

The idea was to make Shargash a deeply tragic character, a once noble and vital figure that self-immolated in grief into a fell and terrible bringer of vengeance with the death of Yelm. The Only Loyal Son. It’s super counter-canonical

It is good, but is it counter-canonical? Tilt your head and squint at the sub-crustal, the Borgesian canon …

• Uncle ZZ is a tragic figure
• ZZ self-immolated
• ZZ is a terrible bringer of vengeance
• ZZ’s sister XU is Yelm’s friend
• ZZ ia an old man with three eyes
• Vorthan is an old man with a red gem in his forehead
• The Blue Moon: niece or sister?
• Shargash = Tolat = Vorthan

The occultists’ rubric clearly states that Shargash = Zorak Zoran . The secret of the light within is that the only loyal sun/son is Oedipus. Introjection is as Freudian a murder method as any.

[scott-martin]

A little busy but some bait needs to be bit at . . . 
 

1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

The occultists’ rubric clearly states

 = 

and furthermore 

 = 

Blah blah blah for sake of union. 

[Eff]

Zorak Zoran's three eyes are known as the Core Top (left), Core Base (right), and Neo Core Fighter (central). It is said that the "firing" of ZZ's third eye (presumably a ceremony of kindling associated with ZZ's High Mega Holy Day) can disintegrate the unprepared.

Edited February 19 by Eff

[Eff]

A slight amuse-bouche from a recent retranslation of Plentonius: the Firespeech original distinguishes between fixed stars, moving stars, and planets in this fashion: "those who pine/yearn", "those who can drive"/"charioteers", and "butches". 

Edited February 20 by Eff

[mfbrandi]

Because it didn’t really belong in RQG Humakti double damage, as it is about plotting RuneSpace …

3 hours ago, Joerg said:

usually, you would draw a phase diagram, something like this …

I like it, but I am not sure how to read it. A two dimensional plot of how many dimensions?

At first I thought that each side of the triangle represented a maxed-out rune (1) and that as one travelled toward the opposite vertex the value dropped to a minimum (0). That seems to work for Death (Orlanth = 0, Humakt = 1, Storm Bull = 1) and Storm (Orlanth = 1, Humakt = 0, Storm Bull = 1), but then what is going on with the third side, as Honour (being bound or compliant) and Mastery (doing the binding or being free) would normally be thought of as opposites, not two ways of saying the same thing? I suppose we could see Urox as maximally distant from self-control, but are Humakt and Orlanth equal in that?

The line from Humakt to Storm Bull cannot be an “inverse death” axis, unless one wants Orlanth to have a higher Death score than Storm Bull — there is a case for that (I guess) but not based on runic associations.

Obviously, we could try to give each deity a score in each rune and then measure their distances from each other in a multi-dimensional space, but then the question would be whether each rune gets an equal “rating” (i.e. each rune’s maximum is the same distance from the origin along its axis as every other is along its — a nominal 1) or whether “high” scores in some runes (e.g. Chaos goes up to 11) immediately position those with a score in it way away from most gods.

So, you know, say more … 😉 Meanwhile, I will try relabelling the triangle in an attempt to clarify it. (I have an idea — it may not work!)

——————————————————
Oops! Just seen Jörg’s edit, so at least some of what is above is wrong.

Edited February 24 by mfbrandi
footnote

[scott-martin]

1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

Oops! Just seen Jörg’s edit, so at least some of what is above is wrong.

Thanks for putting that here. I like seeing that in what would ordinarily be a mechanical thread.

And it builds on the synthetic storm tribe hypothesis that has been on my mind this week anyway.

Consider a place like archaic Fronela  where there is no inherent understanding of "Orlanth" as a separate storm god. Instead they might have a Humakt to oppose the sun and an Eurmal to mediate with the sky, steal fire and get up to other trouble.

They also have their version of the great bull mysteries, the losk-a-lim, but this is already an early syncretism . . . not one of the nine great gods.

In this situation you can have a phase change across Humakt and Eurmal that determines whether "Illumination" (Humakt is one of the students of Rashoran) expresses as honor/truth or tricksterism/illusion. Great, how interesting.

The "death" axis is a little less coherent because the bull itself is outside the early Fronelan system in some ways and so will duplicate some functions while confusing other relationships. We just don't know as much about it. Not as much effort was made to philosophically integrate it into the lightbringer framework . . . maybe that happened in the unwritten teachings of Talor in the liberation of Loskalm, who can say without going there. The important thing is that these are two fighting cults and the local secret of death is hidden here. Maybe the phase shift is about sacrifice and sacrificer, eaten and eater, meat and man . . . a covenant. 

For the relationship on the third side of the triangle, I've reinserted "disorder" because that archaic rune is on my mind and it fits. Again, on the Eurmal side this is the disorganizing power we associate with storm, something like change or movement or transformation. As you transition down to the bull, it translates to something more like "strength." Eurmal dynamics provoke volatility, which then provokes the bull to restorative action. The trickster gets slapped down when the limits stretch too far to tolerate. "Chaos" must be resisted. Disorder.

Somewhere between these factors it is possible to generate a synthetic mastery in the middle, a weltsystemtheorie . . . an "Orlanth" that governs the storm-driven order of things. While this phase is artificial it is relatively stable once it emerges. However, under pressure, it can disintegrate into its precursors. We've seen it happen historically.

The whole is in the shape of a Law.

[mfbrandi]

1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

I will try relabelling the triangle in an attempt to clarify it. (I have an idea — it may not work!)

Should have known it was doomed — as every schoolgirl knows, Truth and Storm never meet (according to Jörg’s handy Rune Index to CoRQ Prosopaedia and simple observations of the Big O).

If you switch to a tetrahedron (Beast rune) with edges for the runes, poor old Humakt doesn’t fit at any vertex as he only has two runes. You could have faces for runes and fit him in the middle of the edge between Death and Truth. Add a face for Mastery to make up the four and Orlanth would go in the middle of the edge between Storm and Mastery (safely removed from Death and Truth), perhaps. But as @Joerg noted, it is a lie that Orlanth has nothing to do with Death, as befits his relationship with Truth. 😉

But as Mallia taught us long ago, runes are not intrinsic to gods, they belong to worshippers and religions.

Edited February 24 by mfbrandi
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