Your Dumbest Theory

[mfbrandi]

The farm is the natural enemy of the forest, and Aldrya’s friendliness toward Ernalda is a sham.

The mother of forests intends to chop out a lot of dead wood — all flesh is dead wood — in the earth goddess family tree. When she is finished, it will be bye-bye to anthropomorphic depictions of Gata, and the blood-drenched clod will take on a different significance.

[JRE]

That is in essence what the Reforesting is. We know* it will mostly fail, but in many areas it will be an exciting period.

I suspect elves do not realize the destructive capacity of organized humans, or how hard it is to prevent forest fires when the pyromaniacs can control weather and have fireblades...

*According to dubious glimpses from the Future, but here the elves fail for being the first to try, just when most humans are gearing for war. Most gains will be lost in the Flood...

[Eff]

Elves are aware of what the succession of vegetation is and the need for continual death and regrowth, rather than aiming for a world of nothing but old-growth forests with dead canopies forever and ever. As such, the Reforestation is a magical working not to encroach with forests (though this happens as dormant dryads and shannassee groves are called to wakefulness) but to bring grasses and shrublands outside of the forest proper into the Aldryami community. The arrival of the Fire Elves is not in service of some messianic rescue, but will instead be the incorporation of flames and controlled burning into the Aldryami worldmind to transform Gata into Gaia. 

(Some psychic sensitives report dreams of a world where there are nothing but black daisies and white daisies covering all of Glorantha, or where this world is watched over by a weltgeist they call 'Lovelock', but we can probably understand these as anxieties spilling over.) 

It is also possible that this is a recurrent event- we go from Gata to Gaia and then back to Gata when the delicate homeostasis is disrupted. This Tau-Iota-Tau Synthesis model is probably a Lunar prank, though! 

[AlHazred]

On 12/21/2022 at 9:48 AM, Eff said:

(Some psychic sensitives report dreams of a world where there are nothing but black daisies and white daisies covering all of Glorantha, or where this world is watched over by a weltgeist they call 'Lovelock', but we can probably understand these as anxieties spilling over.)

There are actually two Great Spirits of the Daisyworld, Lovelock and Watson, but they are not antagonistic, instead working together. But far from being benevolent, the sensitives report that they seem to be attempting to bring the Sun back to the Earth (making it all hotter), obviously by removing Air/Storm altogether!

Edited December 23, 2022 by AlHazred

[jajagappa]

4 hours ago, JRE said:

I suspect elves do not realize the destructive capacity of organized humans, or how hard it is to prevent forest fires when the pyromaniacs can control weather and have fireblades...

Oakfed and Daga, man's two best friends when it comes to fighting Reforestation.  Now, who has the Key to the Iron Box?

[mfbrandi]

7 hours ago, JRE said:

That is in essence what the Reforesting is.

Sure. It was this and talk of getting Aldryan magic through Ernalda that set me off. They may be close in blood/sap/mud, but they cannot but be enemies.

5 hours ago, Eff said:

Elves are aware of what the succession of vegetation is and the need for continual death and regrowth, rather than aiming for a world of nothing but old-growth forests with dead canopies forever and ever.

But forests don’t need human or human-analogue farmers to manage them, else they never would have “evolved”.

[Eff]

25 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

But forests don’t need human or human-analogue farmers to manage them, else they never would have “evolved”.

What I am suggesting is not that humans are essential or seen as essential, but that they are largely irrelevant- one of the components of the greater forest, a set of inhabitants that have their own difficulties and create their own issues- and that the Reforestation isn't actually aimed at exterminating humans, or at extermination at all, or even necessarily at significantly shifting the balance of biomes on the face of Glorantha, because that would be extremely silly. Elves and dryads of fire-dependent species, shade-intolerant species would be- what, killed at birth? Treated as traitors to elfhood, to be on constant watch? Asininity. Elves deserve much better than to simply be agents of self-involved paranoia about what the grass is whispering about (non-specific) you at night. 

 

[Richard S.]

Most rune magic originated as specific variations of "Incarnate Ancestor". Most mortals nowadays are just too weak to fully embody their divine ancestors, so we make do with only partial versions of the spell.

[JRE]

I have always played the forests as a constant stressed system between the elves and the dryads on the local objectives and the general aims. They need each other, but one is fixed in place and the others are mobile, and willing to change forests if needed. This is reflected in the interaction between Aldrya and High King Elf, between Life and Death.

So the dryads surely do not want to start a war and would prefer to get humans onboard or at least quiescent. But the elves are preparing for war, and if all goes well, genocide. Because they "know" that the other side is plotting the same, because that is what they are, a weapon and the last defence of the forest.

This is all generalizations. There are peaceful elves and bloodthirsty dryads, but the general tendency, or the runic affinities, make change difficult in Glorantha, even more so for the Elder races as their Runic ties are much stronger than aimless humans.

 

[mfbrandi]

I think my new dumbest theory is that the best of the dumb theories (not mine, obviously) ought to get compiled into a Jonstown Compendium volume, as this thread seems to have become a safe space for good ideas. (Don’t worry, by tomorrow I will have humbugged away my seasonal good cheer and will be back to my usual grumpy self.)

So where do idiots like me put our really dumb ideas?

[Joerg]

4 hours ago, JRE said:

I have always played the forests as a constant stressed system between the elves and the dryads on the local objectives and the general aims. They need each other, but one is fixed in place and the others are mobile, and willing to change forests if needed. This is reflected in the interaction between Aldrya and High King Elf, between Life and Death.

So the dryads surely do not want to start a war and would prefer to get humans onboard or at least quiescent. But the elves are preparing for war, and if all goes well, genocide. Because they "know" that the other side is plotting the same, because that is what they are, a weapon and the last defence of the forest.

This is all generalizations. There are peaceful elves and bloodthirsty dryads, but the general tendency, or the runic affinities, make change difficult in Glorantha, even more so for the Elder races as their Runic ties are much stronger than aimless humans.

All of that goes mainly for green elfs, who have elf females only for procreation. Yellow elves have no females, brown elf females are "optional" alongside dryads.

The two peninsular yellow elf tribes flanking the Maslo sea show how biology does not explain hostility or friendship.

(One interesting variation on plant people I encountered moderately recently is the culture of the canopy in Kevin Hearne's "The Seven Kennings" series, starting with "A Plague of Giants". Human devotees undergoing a risky rebirth ritual to emerge as forest defenders, like e.g. Warthorns who plant themselves to (fatally) erupt in thorny vines taking down invaders.)

[Darius West]

22 hours ago, Eff said:

 The arrival of the Fire Elves is not in service of some messianic rescue, but will instead be the incorporation of flames and controlled burning into the Aldryami worldmind to transform Gata into Gaia. 

Any Aldryami can become a fire elf when doused with the correct accelerant.  They also become initiates of Brother Dog, as they all go "woof".

Edited December 22, 2022 by Darius West

[scott-martin]

Glorantha was originally much smaller and will one day be larger, expanding as every successful LBQ-style revolution in consciousness opens up new horizons. Fronela, for example, truly did not exist as part of the shared lozenge until Harmast went over the edge of the middle world pursuing desperate solutions and came back with an entire corner piece in tow to knit into the map. He looked west and opened up the west, so we call it "west" faring.

This expansion of geographical possibility overcoming stuck systems is the real bonus. We see it again and again: Heort reaches across the sky to unite Kerofinela with Saird, Ralios is incorporated with the rebirth of Flamal, Seshnela fills in the southwest, the 7M Conspiracy introduces Peloria to its neighbors, Snodal finding the way to the far north. Each iteration opens up new ideas, new combinations, new complexity as once-abstract peripheral territories become integrated into the core experience.

The process is not quite done as the east and south approach their union with the emerging supercontinent. The integration of Sheng, for example, reflects real communion with the east instead of through placeholders and proxies. Eventually whole dimensions unknown to us now will open up, the edges of the world fold back on themselves and the horrible ruptures of zzabur are repaired: the circumference is nowhere, the center is everywhere.

Arguably this is only a different kind of metaphor, with development of the game setting recapitulating the trajectory of mature consciousness itself. Or bring in a dragon with its eggs. Let them hatch, let the system wake up from its dream. In this model, however, the maps are only the shells to be left behind when the occupant has gotten what it needs.

[mfbrandi]

4 hours ago, scott-martin said:

… and the horrible ruptures of zzabur are repaired

That is why you never see him around these days: he is nursing his hernia and trying to invent the truss.

[mfbrandi]

Quote

When the leaders had this new ally they called their unruly companions together to boast and plot. All of the rebels were there, including … Sedenya the Changer, Lanatum the Thunderer and the rest.
— GRoY, p. 14

They’re young.
They’re in love.
And they kill people.

Pale Sedenya and the radiant Sun were daughters of the Empress. Sedenya was envious of the Sun — her mother’s favourite, she thought — and dreamt of taking her sister’s place in her mother’s affections and shining with the joy of it.

Lanatum–Orlanth was a shepherd boy, but he dreamt that he was the rightful Emperor. Surely, his dream was true. After all, his friend Eurmal — the village idiot, who had a wickedly sharp new toy — assured him that it was.

Sedenya and Orlanth met. Each encouraged the other’s delusion. They married. How could they not? Eurmal was maid of honour, but the dress — which was much finer than Orlanth’s — didn’t fit.

Encouraged by Orlanth and Eurmal, Sedenya took Death and murdered the Sun. Immediately, she repented of it and dropped Eurmal’s plaything, but she was ever after stained crimson with her sister’s blood. While Sedenya was weeping, Orlanth carefully lifted Death — still hot from being plunged into his sister-in-law — and stole away in the dark to kill the Empress; that done, he was not at all repentant.

Returning to herself, Sedenya bound Eurmal and Orlanth, assembled her team, and set out on the original Lightbringers’ Quest. Her plan was that she and Orlanth would take the places of the Sun and the Empress in Hell, and that her mother and sister would be returned to life.

She should not have taken the trickster with her: slipping the bonds which should have been secure, Eurmal diced Sedenya and scattered the many pieces throughout the Underworld. Orlanth and Eurmal found a dead ham to play the combined rôle of Sun and Emperor-in-name-only and, trading him for a Sedenya jigsaw puzzle, left the Imperial family in Hell — out of sight and out of mind.

This is why the seventh Lightbringer is mysterious and the Orlanthi do not speak her true name.

The Seven Mothers were attempting to put things right, but they weren’t all singing from the same hymnbook: some thought they were sending Orlanth to Hell as a swap for the Empress and the true Sun, but others that additionally Eurmal could be sent to Hell and a purified White Moon retrieved.

What they got was a very angry, very compromised, red-faced not-quite-goddess, who — to add insult to incompetence — had been retconned into the daughter of the fake Sun. Orlanth and Eurmal’s deception had been baked all-the-more-securely into reality.

When it is said that the Seven Mothers’ LBQ was “partially successful” that is a measure of the quality of PRs hired in the Empire. It was a disaster.

Sedenya doesn’t know whether she will ever be able to write her mother and sister back into Godtime, never mind retrieve them from Hell if she does. At the moment, even she cannot recall their names.

One thing is for sure, once she has finished toying with them, her husband/widower, his sickly green so-called wife, and all their suck-up vassal gods are being sent somewhere that makes Sheng’s custom Hell look like the Ritz: Wakboth’s gullet. And Eurmal and an Orlanthi “superhero” are going to send them there.

(This was inspired by — but doesn’t map 1:1 to — the cut-and-shut myth of Inanna’s Descent as described by Dina Katz.)

Edited December 24, 2022 by mfbrandi

[scott-martin]

Elmal was the southern Orlanthi Sun God, the brother, once first among many.

For the western storm the aloof sun was Grandfather Mortal and the kids hated him. He called himself the emperor of light or the boss who will never retire and get out of the way. Until one kid got him out of the way and his consciousness changed like Oedipus in the fantasy trilogy. He changed and became patron of shamanic ancestor worship.

"One day, the brothers who had been driven out, came together, killed and devoured their father and so made an end to the patriarchal horde. United, they had the courage to do and succeeded in doing what would have been impossible for them individually."

The power of Death was either the first of the New Powers or the last of the old. It came first to the hands of Humakt (who used it on Grandfather Mortal) and then to Orlanth (who used it on Yelm). The death of the Emperor of Light felled the last strongholds of the age, and instituted a new reign.

At a certain historical moment these strands were knit and knotted. Maybe the brother was the one who died and changed. Maybe the father proved harder to kill than hoped and he lives in the back of their heads now. Maybe the sign of all of this is what we call the Y rune, the fork.

Edited January 11, 2023 by scott-martin
see also "kendalamar" in the far south; "malkion"

[mfbrandi]

9 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

Maybe the father proved harder to kill than hoped and he lives in the back of their heads now. Maybe the sign of all of this is what we call the Y rune, the fork.

The oedipal son/sun wants to replace the father and ‘marry’ his mother the earth, so of course the father lives on in the back of the usurper’s head. It is the point, right? Cannibalism = introjection — no fork required: use your bloody hands and eat your rôle-model raw. Eat up all your greens brains or you won’t grow up to be just like Daddy. The poverty of the rebels’ ambition!

This is why there are so many earth goddesses: otherwise family meals would be just too arse-clenchingly embarrassing, even for Orlanth (who cleaned his plate but didn’t quite understand the ‘your’ in ‘eat up all your brains’).

I thought the was a torch. But a torch is useless until lit, and we know what a bum rap light gets in Glorantha. Is it just that no one wants to see what is on the end of their fork? Oh, Burroughs, where art thou?

To their credit, the Uz are quite happy with their repast and find the truth even in the dark. Notably, they are not patriarchal.

There was a troll psychoanalyst, once, but she went out of business. She was philosophical about it: “We’re just too well-adjusted, I guess. I hear that in Orlanthi lands, the headshrinkers get lynched as chaos cultists. Go figure!” She started treating humans, instead, and that is where the giant centipedes come from.

[mfbrandi]

1 hour ago, Joerg said:

On the whole, "When did Ernalda die?" is a trick question. After all, "She is not dead, She is sleeping."

I am beginning to suspect that Ernalda is really Cthulhu. Same complexion, right?

Edited January 12, 2023 by mfbrandi
whitespace

[mfbrandi]

The gods who returned at the dawn were all vanity zombies.

When Spiderwoman set things straight by providing us with time, the gods were no longer needed. Things had been put on a much firmer footing.

But they kept whinging on: “The sun cannot shine without me.” “The wind cannot blow without me.” And on and on. To give the inhabitants of the underworld some peace, the dead gods in their tattered flesh were allowed to shuffle back onto the stage, hungry for brains worship. A lick of paint and a few gallons of formalin and you could hardly tell.

But this was never going to work out long term. They kept fighting. Bits dropped off. The mall was no longer a fun place to hang out. You know how zombies are. So eventually they had to be chucked in the skip maw of Wakboth.

Welcome to the Fourth Age — just like the Third Age but without the appalling smell. That is what it says in the brochure, or so the nice lady with too many legs told me. I can’t read. She lets me turn the pages and look at the pretty pictures, though.

[mfbrandi]

 

8 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

Now word of god IMG. The relationship between Basko or the shadow-of-the-sun, more conventional trolls and whatever they actually do up there on the wild Koromandol coast remains to be explored by those willing to brave that clearly vaginal "pedipalp" standard.

As we know, "documents and oral memories from storm, darkness, and earth cults" converge around the conspiracy of chaos that hatches the devil. And yet here we have an ernalda operating in a different triple act, assisting / facilitating a different birth. Maybe for some people the real devil was time. Maybe for some people the handmaid or "mistress" or midwife isn't the transcendental figure they've developed in Dragon Pass while a dark-derived bug goddess takes the central role. 

For that matter the two dads may or may not be the same figure in different phases of his career or seen from different perspectives. But this is probably veering into the dumb theory zone.

Let it veer.

The hole I was thinking of was the one that joined Inside–Yelm and Outside–Orlanth at their foreheads. (The “contested middle air” is mystification and flummery, and saying “Orlanth is not Chaos” is like saying “Sedenya the Changer wasn’t one of the rebels against Yelm.”) Version one of the standard went:

… but that was too much.

The sun of the Taiwan emblem does look like the gods pulling on the net, doesn’t it? And that is the site of the (re-)birth of the world. The “vagina” that gives birth to the world is the hole trepanned in the forehead — the hole that lets the sun out and chaos in — like Cassandra I cry that ZZ is the mother of us all and XU is the midwife.

Is time the real devil? Yes, but time saves us, too: no time -> no sunrise. ZZ is the god of hate and cruelty and will eventually eat us all, but he burned out his brain to “save” the world. Does this make “him” the mother, the son/sun, and the holy zombie? The Alpha and the Omega, the Arachne and the Zorak. (Billy Ockham — patron deity of barbers — hacks away at our divine ontology.)

As for “the two dads may or may not be the same figure in different phases of his career or seen from different perspectives”, when we need fathers, this always turns out to be true — in a twisted Heinleinian bootstrappy way … and the father and the mother are the same person, too.

There is a line of collapse: polytheism -> monotheism -> pantheism -> mysticism/atheism/solipsism … ’cos a girl must have choices, and they gotta come in threes.

[scott-martin]

7 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

when we need fathers

Yeah, the market is almost in a place where I can engage with this seriously. But if ZZ is the mother and XU is the midwife, the baby in this parthenogenetic system must be the Curse, right? Who is KL, the goddess of the blasted people forced to the surface to confront Time as she herself was pushed forward to interact with the Man Rune.

So we have:



Who is missing? All the Orlanths . . . and all of Ernalda's children, for that matter. When is a mother goddess not a mother goddess? When it's another goddess who is the mother goddess. Unless of course someone is present here in disguise or has been reborn to atone for past mistakes.

Rashoran. The Third Eye, which might be open at the top of the skull or down in the perineum country. Three others found that they were not afraid, and that they could use the fears of others to their own ends. One of the first things they did was to destroy Rashoran to keep his secret to themselves.

To the extent to which "Humakt" and "Uleria" (another dyad, phallic cigar and primal cup, although he was nobody before he murdered his shadowy predecessor or "grandfather," sound familiar?) learned the lesson, they were "fortified" and are not chaotic today. Uleria could easily have become a mother of abominations, probably is in some corners of the lozenge.

Trolls care about chaos and love Humakt. Maybe modern Orlanth falls under that protective shadow . . . past crimes unseen.

[mfbrandi]

We think of the tale of the lightbringer quest as inscribing the familiar cycles of day and year into the world–story, but maybe the real point was to exclude cycles — the moon was written out and she was not happy about it. I mean “I will feed you all to the Bat” unhappy.

In the moon’s absence, what magic “governed” Gloranthan menstruation? Who was even paying attention? (The Seven Mothers ritual? All a blind.) All that blood. All those moon cups. All those hundreds of years. All … That … Blood! And it all flowed together, and it rose into the middle air.

People make excuses for Orlanth who came over all stabby when he couldn’t be boss of everyone, when he couldn’t have all the Lebensraum he craved. But they damn Sedenya who was pissed at getting written out of reality entirely.

But is she bitter? Well, she is singing at least:

     My air will be different my hair and my face
     You’ll be surprised at all the things I replace
     I’m gonna change my whole psychology
     And daddy that ain’t all
     I'll even find new ways to have myself a ball
     You’ll find your baby's always fit
     There’ll be some changes made today
     There’ll be some changes made

[mfbrandi]

7 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

KL, the goddess of the blasted people forced to the surface …


Rashoran. The Third Eye … One of the first things they did was to destroy Rashoran to keep his secret to themselves … Trolls care about chaos and love Humakt.

All that stuff about chaos monsters and unholy alliances? Just window to confuse the enemy radar. Dropped by people who want a moralized cosmogony. Do we want to hang out with those people? Hell, no. But drilling holes in generous Chaos/Rashoran/Huntun … and Chaos died … this we might believe. And then we are cooking with plasma. Drill a hole in Zorak Zoran and he “becomes” the devil, time, and the people — the beautiful, burned, im/perfect people.

Wakboth–Arachne = ZZ–ZZ, of course.

I do like — I love — your idea of the Uz as the burned people who must colonize the surface world after the holocaust of creation, of Light burning its way out of Zorak Zoran. Of course, the burned people are in some sense the children of ZZ, the monster who burned himself. And if the people are sometimes tempted to see the Light as a purely destructive, external force, XU knows that it came from within and that although it can destroy, it also sustains — and brings or accompanies change, frightening change. If she is sometimes a pot, she is an urn of cremains (symbolizing her protection of her poor burned brother).

We know that creation is ongoing through the Third Age and the Hero Wars and that in the Fourth Age, only one humanoid race has any significant presence — only us. But who are we? Argrath is Arkat. And Arkat was a troll. The sentimentalist in me wants to think that the enlo inherit the planet, but following Planet of the Apes, it could be a mixed community of trolls and kin … with some herdmen as a reminder of the humans who blew the whole thing up (who were the final expression of ZZ’s act of creation?), perhaps.

(Or possibly Genertela is a wasteland, repopulated by Uz from Pamaltela; presumably, they — like the enlo — are better adapted to light and heat than other trolls. There wasn’t an illiteracy plague, just a period where Pamaltelans had to excavate and decipher what was left of Genertelan literature.)

Trolls worried about chaos? They want to take a good look at Zorak Zoran. Fire, violence, hate, zombies, … You can try to externalize all the scary stuff which will bring an end to everything, and you can call it by a hated name, but there is no “them”, because we are all Uz — even the scary monsters (Yelm) and supercreeps (Orlanth). And if many trolls have a hard time taking a look in the mirror, they are not really built for it.

If trolls love Humakt, it is because they are realists. One day, it will all be over — not pretend ‘happy hunting ground’/‘Orlanth’s feasting hall’ over, but really over — and they have made, or are trying to make, their peace with that. Written on Humakt’s sword: TERMINUS EST.

The XU theologians suspect that when we are all long dead and the universe has settled down as near to its zero state as it will ever get — and her brother consequently has a moment’s peace — some random fluctuation will cause the void to explode into flames, the universe will be born again, Zorak Zoran’s cosmic torment will return. It is said that ZZ is the god of torture, but it is less often said that it is Zorak Zoran who is the eternal torture victim. But he is a good Nietzschean and has said “yes” to this eternal recurrence. The XU theologians ask: if the child returns to Omelas to be tortured voluntarily, life-after-life, would you still walk away?

ZZ’s suffering made me think of Prometheus and Loki — with XU as Sigyn? — and looking at Wikipedia’s section on the etymology of “Loki” turned up some happy accidents: flame (not really); “things to do with loops (like knots, hooks, closed-off rooms, and locks)”; “harvestmen, modern Swedish lockespindlar ("Locke-spiders")”; “Hence, it is natural that Loki is the inventor of the fishnet”. Sometimes the universe is generous.

And we creep — by fractions of a millimeter — toward a semblance of coherence?

[scott-martin]

On 1/11/2023 at 1:09 PM, mfbrandi said:

I thought the was a torch.

Upon more careful consideration, knowing that the table implement we call the "fork" will not be introduced to Glorantha until the early Sixth Age, I think this is actually a mask of the Lodril plow. We call it "truth" and hand it to the father-and-sun gods but its real master remains the primal paterfamilias, the absent ancient of days.

And here is the mask of the other plow:



Yes, they are both forks that assist in symbolic cannibal feasts. But the application and the yields are very different to the point that the etiquette almost completely changes.

[jajagappa]

51 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

I think this is actually a mask of the Lodril plow

Looks more like the Water Divination stick, I think (and in which case, it correctly points to Daliath's Well of Wisdom, the ultimate Truth).