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Your Dumbest Theory


scott-martin

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"Every six hundred years you have come" is Gbaji's second-greatest trick. The greatest, of course, is when he tells you he can take the blame for your own actions.

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Though a Lunar through and through, she is also a human being.

"I just read an article in The Economist by a guy who was riding around with the Sartar rebels, I mean Taliban," -Greg Stafford, January 7th, 2010

Eight Arms and the Mask

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10 hours ago, Eff said:

The greatest [trick], of course, is when he tells you he can take the blame for your own actions.

“Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine … My sins my own, they belong to me” kinda thing? Every teenager’s credo, because we were all arrogant pricks back then.

When some goody-two-shoes claims to have perfected this illusion through long hours of work in Daddy’s basement, we don’t really like it.

But when the Devil (Wakboth, Kajabor, whoever you hate when you look in the mirror) -> Demon (ZZ, Azhrarn) -> Trickster (Wile E., Loki) attempts this bit of business, it has a little more charm, no?

Focus all the hate and filth of the world at one point and maybe we can work miracles. And maybe the boy understood this; maybe we misunderstood the radicalism of the descent into the world, of the word made flesh. Why this is Hell, nor am I out of it. You are not just pinning a paragon to a plank, there’s more … even if it is a “trick”. Of whose party without knowing it?

See the trouble with Yeshua is he went with the wrong agent. “Stick with Judas,” I said, “Ignore those other schmucks — in the long run, they’ll just make you look like a schmendrick.” Did he listen to his Uncle Lew?

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NOTORIOUS VØID CULTIST

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"The turtle couldn't help us."
-It, Stephen King

Quote

"Orlanth cast about for help or guidance and was answered by Sofala, the ancient Turtle Grandmother. She owed Orlanth a favor, and agreed to bear them across the seas to the best of her ability."
-King of Sartar, Greg Stafford

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"Orlanth gave command of the stead to Elmal, his loyal thane, and they traded shields as a token of their bond."
-King of Sartar, Greg Stafford

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"A! Lucifer, that risedest early, how fellest thou down from heaven; thou that woundedest folks, felledest down together into earth."
-Isaiah 14:12, trans. John Wycliffe

Why was Theya important enough to those crazy folks living in the time after Time began to call themselves her people? Why did she stop being important, and when? When does the "Lightbringers Quest" become standardized as 7(+) specific people, with those names?

Perhaps it is this- Theya appeared to people to explain to them that the gods were back, to reawaken the connections. But this must have been news for many people, who were sure that gods like Humakt and Elmal or Orlanth had remained alive and in the world. They had to invent stories, like the one where Orlanth went to the underworld carrying Elmal's shield and Elmal ruled the stead with Orlanth's shield, so that you couldn't tell who was whom, to straighten it all out.

But Theya herself would be an intermediary, an interpreter of who had done what and gone where. Such would be intolerable- the direct mystical revelation against the body of established knowledge. Thus, the Lightbringers were woven together out of a body of myth that put them together already, producing a mostly-coherent mythic complex which could challenge Theya and displace her position.

It only worked partway. Theya lost relevance even as they took the name of her devotees, the mystic speakers to the morning star, those that climbed toward heaven, and made it their own. But what remained? Contact with the stars. The Lightbringer mythplex had to be bent out of shape. And because they had to retain that myth where Orlanth and Elmal traded places, there would always be some confusion, some uncertainty, an essential crack in the wall for the dawn's early light to seep in, or perhaps a gap in the wall's crenelations for a high-jumping star to vault over.

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Though a Lunar through and through, she is also a human being.

"I just read an article in The Economist by a guy who was riding around with the Sartar rebels, I mean Taliban," -Greg Stafford, January 7th, 2010

Eight Arms and the Mask

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3 hours ago, Eff said:

Why was Theya important enough to those crazy folks living in the time after Time began to call themselves her people? Why did she stop being important, and when?

Theya and Rausa are the two red celestial goddesses of transition. The Dawn was all about transition, and so was the early part of the Dawn Age. Even the warlike descendants of the VIngkotlings were champions of peace and cooperation.

But dawn gave way for day, and the Sun people proved to be inimical and murderous, necessitating a shift in policies from the World Council of Friends to the Second Council. While still optimistic and forward-looking, their conflict with the horse warlords gave prominence to cults like Zorak Zoran, echoing the Gods War.

The tipping point may have been the Bridling of Kargzant and the Empty Year of the horse warlord emperors. A different tribe of charioteers came to dominance, and the Hyaloring horse riders suffered from their god's loss of freedom. Lightbringer missionaries were captured and murdered, without a chance to spread their creed of cooperation among mortals and with the now distant and bound deities.

Or it may have been the pernicious post-mortem influence of the Feldichi, whose ruins became the seat of the Second Council, and whose inhabitants started numerous experiments beyond human ken and understanding. The missionaries became less trusting, and spread their message as much with arms as with harmony. All the way to the insidious ways of the Bright Empire missionaries in the West.

Transition was a thing of the past, instead the focus was on ascension, and of testing the limits of the Compromise.

 

It is a bit ironic that the entity born from the Sunstop embodying the unwavering light has become the guardian of the Lunar cycle.

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Telling how it is excessive verbis

 

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On 1/21/2023 at 8:38 AM, mfbrandi said:

On my bad days, I think “imperial Kralorela” is a collective illusion, maintained in a Berkeleyan act of will by scholarly exertion.
— (with apologies to) Prof. Dennis Grafflin of Bates College

It is well known that Godunya is not a dragon, he is a giant chicken.

Well known outside Krlaorela, whose survival depends on continuing to be fooled.

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9 hours ago, John Biles said:

It is well known that Godunya is not a dragon, he is a giant chicken.

Dragon —> Dinosaur —> Chicken

Phylogenetically, one suspects pretty much everything in Glorantha is a dragon. (OK, maybe I exaggerate.)

When Godunya says “I am a chicken but not a dragon” you should be afraid, very afraid.

NOTORIOUS VØID CULTIST

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Trees have spirits.
Rocks have spirits.
Rivers have spirits.
But we don’t say that in Glorantha, there are no trees, rocks, or rivers.

Diseases have spirits.
But we do tend to say that in Glorantha, diseases are caused by spirits, not microbes.

Let us just bite the bullet: Gloranthans don’t have germ theory — @Joerg can jump in and correct me about that! 😉 — but Glorantha has viruses, bacteria, and microscopic parasites; it is just that like every other damned thing, those entities have spirits.

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NOTORIOUS VØID CULTIST

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3 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Dragon —> Dinosaur —> Chicken

Phylogenetically, one suspects pretty much everything in Glorantha is a dragon. (OK, maybe I exaggerate.)

When Godunya says “I am a chicken but not a dragon” you should be afraid, very afraid.

The next step after Chicken is obviously the Egg.  And out of the Egg, the Cosmic cycle begins again (which is why you should then be afraid) for it has achieved Unity.

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Who invented the runes, at least in their written form?

Evidence begins to emerge.

Spoiler

The Round Way (Yuan dao 圜道)

The way of Heaven is round; the way of Earth is square. The sage kings took this as their model, basing on it [the distinction between] above and below. How do we explain the roundness of Heaven? The essential qi (jingqi 精氣)alternately moves up and down, completing a cycle and beginning again (huan zhou fu za 圜周復雜),delayed by nothing; that is why we speak of the way of Heaven as round. How do we explain the squareness of Earth? The ten thousand things are distinct in category and shape. Each has its separate responsibility [as an official does, jie you fen zhi 皆有分職], and cannot carry out that of another; that is why one speaks of the way of Earth as square.

The Annals of Lü Buwei, trans. Nathan Sivin (Sources of Chinese Tradition, revised edition, vol. 1)

And we all remember the form the man rune took for a while.

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NOTORIOUS VØID CULTIST

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1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

Who invented the runes, at least in their written form?

I love it. The usual suspects are unlikely:

Dara Happa still resists the five-element model, opting to either stick with four or sublimate straight to "six" without making space for the air. The archaic west struggled to fit its more fragmented elemental system (best embodied in the alchemical metals, including "zrethus" and "uleria" as well as the problem with quicksilver) into the five-element model. Pamalt simply doesn't seem to care because every entity is an individual with a name and personality . . . and not so much a representative of a larger state of matter. 

A vithelan origin hypothesis would also be really useful for giving us at least two somewhat overlapping primal magic frameworks there: the binary calculator that generates something like hexagrams out of the fundamental eight power situations, and the mutual generation / mutual overcoming matrix of the elements. The tension between these frameworks in turn generates their history or whatever they have there.

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2 hours ago, scott-martin said:

I love it. The usual suspects are unlikely:

Dara Happa still resists the five-element model, opting to either stick with four or sublimate straight to "six" without making space for the air. The archaic west struggled to fit its more fragmented elemental system (best embodied in the alchemical metals, including "zrethus" and "uleria" as well as the problem with quicksilver) into the five-element model. Pamalt simply doesn't seem to care because every entity is an individual with a name and personality . . . and not so much a representative of a larger state of matter. 

A vithelan origin hypothesis would also be really useful for giving us at least two somewhat overlapping primal magic frameworks there: the binary calculator that generates something like hexagrams out of the fundamental eight power situations, and the mutual generation / mutual overcoming matrix of the elements. The tension between these frameworks in turn generates their history or whatever they have there.

Wu Xing (philosophy/metaphysics)

 

It's not hard to find some resonances of ZZBR's sigil if you look, though it does suggest some fascinating resonances for ZZBR himself. (Is there a way to turn "ZZBR" into "BLVTSKY" or appropriate reduction? Without having to do three impossible things before breakfast?)

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Though a Lunar through and through, she is also a human being.

"I just read an article in The Economist by a guy who was riding around with the Sartar rebels, I mean Taliban," -Greg Stafford, January 7th, 2010

Eight Arms and the Mask

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13 minutes ago, Eff said:

Is there a way to turn "ZZBR" into "BLVTSKY" or appropriate reduction? Without having to do three impossible things before breakfast?

You simply have to translate "god learning" as θεοσοφῐ́ᾱ to take the mellow "sober" way . . . or for the inebriated (BLVTRSKY) route superimpose Man Rune onto the elemental pentagram like the cool kids and the rare unreconstructed/naive ZZBR precipitates as a fresh-faced enfant terrible. There might also be a third ferlie where you and I are not necessarily going today because only the bonnie brown man knows.

I wonder what they have in Kralorela instead of an equivalent to the LBQ/7MQ/zzaburquest. Maybe they just don't think they need one.

Edited by scott-martin
why this zzbr is rare pepe
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singer sing me a given

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51 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

Maybe they just don't think they need one.

Hmm …

They did send a disruptive type on a journey to the west, but unlike their earthly counterparts, they decided that on balance there was nothing they wanted to bring back.

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NOTORIOUS VØID CULTIST

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1 hour ago, scott-martin said:

wonder what they have in Kralorela instead of an equivalent to the LBQ/7MQ/zzaburquest. Maybe they just don't think they need one.

It's all in the Calendar!  

Remember (Guide p.112): The Vithelan cultures persist in using six seasons of 7 weeks each. This method is widely popular throughout Kralorela, the East Isles, Teshnos, and Vormain.

Which means that all 294 days of the year are accounted for! There is no distinct Sacred Time.  (The seasons and weeks were denoted somewhere in the past - old RQ3 Genertela book maybe?  That might tell us something about how they contribute to the world renewal.

(Similarly the Pamaltelans: use a four season period. Each season consists of 72 days (12 weeks with 6 days each). The extra six days, called Holy Week, resembles the Sacred Time.)

 

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16 minutes ago, jajagappa said:

old RQ3 Genertela book maybe?

Actually right in the Guide p.661 (2nd book, not the first).  The final season of the year is...:

THE SEASON OF SPIRIT

  • The week of Exuberant Creation
  • The week of Portentous Gloom
  • The week of the Unpathed Waters
  • The week of the Living Glebe
  • The week of Effulgent Radiance
  • The week of Novel Tempestuousness
  • The week of Universal Ruin

Clearly it is the last two that require specific prayers, sacrifices, etc. 

Interesting to look at the prior five weeks though, i.e. they correspond to: Celestial Court, Darkness, Water, Earth (got to love the Living Glebe!), Fire, before succumbing to Storm, and presumably Chaos.

The whole season then becomes preparation for world renewal.

Edited by jajagappa
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19 hours ago, jajagappa said:

Which means that all 294 days of the year are accounted for! There is no distinct Sacred Time.  (The seasons and weeks were denoted somewhere in the past - old RQ3 Genertela book maybe?  That might tell us something about how they contribute to the world renewal.

Love it! Looking at the weekly cycles, I'm starting to suspect the sages who translated the calendar actually got it backward (the Godtime year began in the ruin of spirit and ended in the wisdom of silence) but it's more likely that their Kralorelan informants gave them this version for their own reasons. The Ignorant might openly proclaim the reverse version and the fact that it goes widdershins actually makes it more appealing to them.

The 6 x 7 x 7 layout would generate an incomplete set of power "trigrams" (combinations only, one western power is not used so you have seven radicals to start with, no doubles or triples) but without additional insight into their court magic I don't know how exactly they stack the radicals or whether each week has a fixed trigram or something the oracles dynamically assign. Probably all have been true in the Gloranthan past and all will get their curtain call in the hero wars.

Edited by scott-martin
combinations / permutations vary from the 易

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lightbringer-moon.thumb.png.3abcd67b960a33d0a2c0ff5caafe2781.png

Not so much a dumb theory as the orthodoxy that dare not speak its name: yes it is :20-element-air: wrapped around the handle of the three-tined fork of recreation, but look what is being (re)created. The question is not whether there are :20-element-moon: runes hiding in there but how many.

(They could have used an inverted :20-sorcery-tap: (not tapping but giving back), or half of a :20-element-fire:, … , but they didn’t. And :20-element-air: is the ouroboros (Wakboth) that missed its own mouth, just asking to be superimposed on :20-condition-fate:.)

This underscores the theory that every time the big dumb O breaks something and tries to fix it, he advances the RG’s grand plan by a step. Who ever saw Sedenya pulling on a strand of the Net?

Even the colour symbolism plays ball: clearly storm orange is just an intermediate step between solar yellow and lunar red. Orlanth as king is clearly an unstable intermediate state, as is a “lunar” empire that hasn’t shed its solar components: the Orlanthi vs. Dara Happa is an orange-on-orange Gloranthan mirror fight. And in some parts of this world, orange stands for prison, right?

None of this is news to anyone. The puzzle is why we would want to inhabit the Orlanthi POV without a big dose of irony (detachment, gleeful aspect-flipping, … play). To me, a Brechtian RPG sounds kinda fun; to others, not so much, I suspect.

Edited by mfbrandi
too many justs
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NOTORIOUS VØID CULTIST

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1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

 :20-element-air: wrapped around the handle of the three-tined fork of recreation

Isn't this "the Jagekriand weapon" or northern thunderbolt I see on all the lightning chariots these days? Maybe the imperial problem with Orlanth is that they're really talking about a vestige of sinister Tarumath too recalcitrant to assimilate and too stubborn to die in the dawn wars. That's who they were hoping to kill down in the south. And the moon turns.

Related: Derek Jarman once made the observation (illuminating to me at least) that "brown" is only an opaque orange, an orange that no longer emits light. This feels like it has strange bearing on the elf-on-elf religious wars, with their original orange gods hardening into a new relationship with death as alien to the green establishment as to hapless meat chroniclers.

 

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It would be harsh to point out that the Jagekriand Weapon so beloved of the Orlanthi looks like the hated -- but similarly devastating -- Tap Rune of the godless Meldek, so on this matter I will remain silent. (See also starveling tribes begging for a place in the cosmos, strategic deterrence using Dragons vs. Bats, etc.)

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The vajra or thunderbolt began as a sling bullet, and then mutated spontaneous into a mace or club, with a ribbed head. As Buddhism carried the thunderbolt north and east, the head doubled, the ribs became prongs, and a whole family of thunderbolt types emerged, sometimes merging with the bell to produce bells with prongs on the handle, and Tantric ways proceeded to assign a great deal of symbolism to this shape. 

To contrast, the Hellenistic thunderbolt is irregular in shape, a bunch of sticks tied together but sticking out at all angles, though a triune profile seems fairly common on coins (along with pentuple ones) and is probably a missile, a javelin or a thrown object. 

In turn, the western Levantine understanding is that thunder is speech, a voice pronouncing a curse or an exclamation. The vajra is also called a "diamond scepter", so we perhaps must conclude that thunder and thunderbolts are passed around casually and loosely, almost slatternly. 

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Though a Lunar through and through, she is also a human being.

"I just read an article in The Economist by a guy who was riding around with the Sartar rebels, I mean Taliban," -Greg Stafford, January 7th, 2010

Eight Arms and the Mask

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