Your Dumbest Theory

[mfbrandi]

LEAVING ULERIA

“Uleria is perhaps the single easiest cult to join … to become an initiate anyone can join as long as they are not Chaotic … That’s just no good. No love there.” — Joining Uleria on WoD

Uleria is not Love. Uleria is one model of reproduction pushed on us as the essence of creation. But Uleria and Chaos create in different ways.°

Uleria’s model is this: either take one thing and Xerox it, or take two things and blend them. This doesn’t get one very far.

For interesting results — per the OG Chuck D — one needs both mutation (i.e. Chaos, perhaps even in the form of Pocharngo, whatever the tabloids say) and selection pressure (i.e. Death/Humakt). Without the Lords of Terror, Uleria is nothing. The Order — the sculpted diversity — we see in Life comes from Chaos and Death.

But with Chaos, first there was nothing, then there was something. Why? No reason. Now that is creativity.

And then there is Mallia, happily reproducing and evolving away without the need to deny the necessity of Death and Chaos. Is that Darkness? If you will, but all the better to soak up the life-giving photons: Mallia’s photosynthesis predates sexual reproduction and multicellular life.°° Everything comes out of its opposite, and Mallia is not foolish enough to deny this.

“No sexy vampires in Glorantha? Vampires are the most depressing and horrific creatures … pure ego, no soul, no creativity, no unconscious … driven by nihilistic intellect and twisted hunger.” — Joining Uleria on WoD

Frankly, sexy vampires have been boring us for a very long time by now. If Glorantha has its competing Skynets — Mostal (or its cult) and Mother Krarsht (but not her cult) — trying to convert Glorantha into their versions of computronium, these sound like its terminators — draped in human flesh, but in the end seeming no more human than Arnie.

Alternative view: the sainted Joanna noted that although we like to knock wannabe vampires, to the powerless — constrained in their Victorian corsets, say — that promise of power has a real and intelligible appeal. Those empowered by the existing order see things differently: uppity virgins baring their necks, don’t they know their place?°°° The virgin’s blood gets spilt either way, but by refusing initiation into Uleria, she exercises her ego, denies the equation creation = reproduction, and reaches for power for herself. Is that wrong? Ah, but if a woman seeks power for herself, she is a monster. Silly me!

But at least everyone agrees that sparkly Mormon vampire venom enabling childbirth is just yuck! (What, not even an Orlanthi all?)

° Nysalor taught me this, so it must be true.
°° https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthesis#Evolution
°°° Yes, yes, I know, but it is a first step on the path.

Edited September 6, 2023 by mfbrandi
definite article —> indefinite article

[mfbrandi]

In the Babs thread, the old blood = beer thing came up again, which set me thinking — in an overheated, unreliable way — but the result probably belongs here. It will certainly have loose ends.

I was wondering why Babs got such a solar myth.

EGYPT°
Hathor/Sekhmet/Bastet/Raet (Hathor–Sekhmet for short) = mother/sibling/placenta/consort/daughter of the sun god = the sun disk (or sphere, red) = the Eye of Ra (the violent sun) = the Morning Star/Venus or Sothis/Sirius (heralds of the sun). Dare we say, the sun seen as female, or the all-purpose solar goddess?

At year’s start, Sothis rose just before the sun, heralding the start of the Nile inundation. Therefore, the Eye of Ra precedes and represents the floodwaters that restore fertility to Egypt.

In the Hathor–Sekhmet berserker myth, she is sent to destroy mortals by — and is an aspect of — the sun. Is it too much to suppose that the sun’s switch from harsh destroyer to something more benign comes when it heralds the Nile flood? Then the lake of red beer is the Nile floodwater — and possibly also menstrual blood? (I may have left »cough« scholarship »cough« a long way behind by now!)

GLORANTHA°°
The Oslira = the Nile in miniature. The Red Goddess = Hathor–Sekhmet. Let us try those on, at least.

Orlanth claims to have murdered the sun and brought him back, but:

• “She fought with Yelm and was one of the rebel gods who murdered Murharzarm” — is a very cagey way of saying Sedenya daily “murders” the sun
• “Certainly the One Sun would not come and go as Sedenya does” — but that is exactly what it does (seven-times faster), and “Sedenya is the source of all powers that are recognized as being cyclical.”
• The Red Goddess’s “special powers of Time” are constantly doubted, but she gives birth to the sun — her hairy-faced aspect — every morning. Solara Tempora and all that.

It begins to look like the boys are fighting the girls for possession of the same myths. Do we believe that handshake between Yelm and Orlanth was the stitch-up, or is it their worshippers who are responsible for the struggle?

Certainly, one can see how Sedenya would be cheesed off at being excluded from the new world whose sun she birthed and whose cycles she runs.

If the Red Emperor is the sun on earth, then according to this spiel, he is rightly the daughter of the Red Goddess. But he is also the parent of (e.g.) Jar-eel who is the Red Goddess on earth. This is appropriately bootstrappy — per Heinlein & Gerrold — for the Solars, who don’t like to think of the sun as having parents, as such: if the sun must have a parent, it is its own parent. The tension is between “the sun ought to be butch and constant, like a man” and “the actual sun is fickle and cyclical, like a girl!” Anxious geezers see problems where there are none.

Anyway, the blood/water/beer of the Nile/Oslira: for it to be of use, it might seem, it has to sink into the earth. I guess this is where Hon-eel comes in. Hon-eel who nowadays sports , but used to own a glyph that seemed to combine : . I guess the trouble with lunar cult runes is that 7M seemed to get it right first time with (paralleling or prefiguring the sun’s , which itself might look like life and death held apart by a pair of breasts — paging Doctor Freud!), but repetition was considered undesirable. It is Sedenya’s labial that keeps the sun of time balanced between life and death, and as paid-up Young Glorantha Creationists, that is the only sun we will recognise. As so often Yelm the ham seems an imposter, brought on to glad-hand when only a beard will do. But who is he working for? Or does that change, too? In time — we trust — all masks will be shed, all illusions stripped away: you say you cannot see the Goddess in the sky in the 4th Age, but surely you can see the sun; the sun is the “invisible” moon, and isn’t that always the way? Alice’s women men can’t see. And if Babs doesn’t hold a harsh axe, who does? [I told you I would ramble.]

So Hon-eel’s giving blood to the earth is — from the other end — Babeester Gor drinking blood/beer/floodwater. Life comes only from death. But whose blood (or “blood”) is needed? Who is right, Babs or Hon-eel? Is Babs another co-opted member of the “Fire Tribe”? Is this just cults fighting over a myth? Is Babs the patriarchy’s “monstering” of Hon-eel, or is Hon-eel as we know her as distorted a view — hideously prettified by “Mucha” — of what is really going on? This at least: Sedenya’s light makes the floodwater look red.

[Probably best abandoned here: to polish further would be to deny its faecal essence. I was right that it didn’t belong in the other thread, at least.]

—————————————————————————————————
° Bits lifted, remixed, and inexpertly interpreted from these Wikipedia sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sekhmet#Roles
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_of_Ra#Roles
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hathor

°° Quotes from CoR Prosopaedia, mostly p. 108

[mfbrandi]

Everything has to be recast with our favourite uncle in the starring rôle. Queering the pitch: it is the law. These fragments I have shored against my ruins:

• There is a dark sphere. It is hollow. Its inner lining is the surface of the sun. The sphere has a hole in it, or a slit. In the morning, the inner surface passes through the hole: the sphere is turned inside out; the sun is born from darkness. (In the evening? Well, you pick up the pieces, you connect the dots.)
   
• The mystics whisper that Zorak Zoran is sometimes called “Sun Belly” and “the Womb of the Goddess.” Every evening, Zorak Zoran swallows/is impregnated by the sun. Every morning, Zorak Zoran gives birth to/vomits up the sun. Zorak Zoran is the passage of the sun through the underworld. (This is called ‘damage limitation.’)
   
• Xiola Umbar is said to be a midwife and to clean up her brother’s messes: these things are the same. The secret of the light within.
   
• Arachne is the sun spider, yet she is said to give birth to time, not the sun. Why is this, given that time and the sun’s cycles seem so very nearly the same? Spiders and demons both will eat you soon as look at you, but perhaps mortals still refuse to own that the god of hate — Lord Demon of the Legions of Death — and the goddess of nature are one and the same. Wilful blindness. She eats anything caught in her web, and her web encompasses everything: the sun is cosmos and swallowing the sun is being impregnated by the devil.
   
• Bright Sedenya, who impregnates the darkness; the darkness, who gives birth to the sun; the sun, who is … [loop]
   
• Yelmalio is that of the sun which does not die: Sol Invictus, the winter sun, all the lights of the night sky, our hope as we stare into the void, Rashorana–Nysalor.° But if that is her triumph, it is also his tragedy: never dying, s/he was never born; ever cut off from the cycles of the cosmos, s/he illuminates but is never blown out. No dot, no line. No hole, no slit. No window, no way out. And that’s the truth. (The alternative is to give birth to oneself, but that is chaos.)
   

[Monomyth threatens us: redundancy or monotheism — choose!]

° “All the lights of the night sky” — the management takes this opportunity to deny that these are gobbets of solar semen spaffed against the inside of the sky dome, so go wash out your mouth with walktapus ink if you are the one who has been spreading this scurrilous rumour.

[scott-martin]

6 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Arachne is the sun spider, yet she is said to give birth to time, not the sun. Why is this, given that time and the sun’s cycles seem so very nearly the same?

Solara Tempora (S.T.) reckons from the "first sunrise" but modern Yelm is not the first sun.

Zorak Zoran is both the rehabilitated devil and the father of all great trolls, making them brothers like the sons of some kind of cave tolat ministering to his multi-breasted amazons.

 

[Nick Brooke]

7 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

The mystics whisper that Zorak Zoran is sometimes called “Sun Belly” and “the Womb of the Goddess.” Every evening, Zorak Zoran swallows/is impregnated by the sun. Every morning, Zorak Zoran gives birth to/vomits up the sun. Zorak Zoran is the passage of the sun through the underworld. (This is called ‘damage limitation.’)

This also explains why Zorak Zorani like really spicy food. It’s a religious experience.

[jajagappa]

3 minutes ago, Nick Brooke said:

This also explains why Zorak Zorani like really spicy food.

Trollkin marinated in ghost pepper oil?

[mfbrandi]

1 hour ago, scott-martin said:

modern Yelm is not the first sun

I am not 100% sure he is even the current one.

1 hour ago, scott-martin said:

Zorak Zoran is … the rehabilitated devil

“Rehabilitated” — don’t say that. He is very sensitive and prefers “unrepentant.”

[mfbrandi]

On 5/13/2022 at 11:15 AM, MOB said:

“Your Glorantha Will Vary” … means … you are free and welcome to take what you want from the incredibly rich tapestry of myth, magic, history and wonder of Glorantha for use in your own games.

Quote

You take what you need
And you leave the rest

— Jaime Robertson, The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down

Edited September 8, 2023 by mfbrandi
excess whitespace

[Qizilbashwoman]

9 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

I am not 100% sure he is even the current one.

who do you suspicion replaced Muharzam

[mfbrandi]

6 hours ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

Who do you suspect replaced Muharzam?

Sorry. Just a running gag about the guy with the beard being a washed-up actor hired to do solar PR — and doing a poor job of it. I don’t have any deep wisdom about the sun’s true identity, though I have made various silly suggestions (which I like, but no one else has to). There is always this:

• Certainly, he said, the One Sun would not come and go, as Sedenya did. — GRoY, p. 24

There is a pompous solar strain that denies the realities of the sun — although perhaps the Solar Cults book will punch holes in that when it comes out — and I like anything that will tweak the patriarchs’ noses: Zorak Zoran, the blessed RG, even Gorakiki Beetle.

 

Or maybe the sun is some random horse running loose in Pent. Or we have a Spartacus/Brian situation: not only — per the Great Beast — is every man and every woman a star, we are all the same star; surely that has cult written all over it.

 

Spoiler

Spartacus/Brian: this would fit well enough with the Gorakiki suggestion, giving the cult slogan and song: “life’s a piece of shit, when you look at it”; Always Look on the Bright Side of Life. Gorakiki–Sisyphus?

 

Edited September 9, 2023 by mfbrandi
footnote

[Nick Brooke]

12 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Killjoy Interpretation

That's the "dumb theory," right?

[mfbrandi]

1 minute ago, Nick Brooke said:

That's the "dumb theory," right?

Well, it is not a “dumb theory” in the sense of a stupid theory that we love, but it is stupid.

Here — and elsewhere — people will sometimes get on their high horses and declare “Glorantha’s not like that.” Sometimes, it is an honest mistake or someone is having a bad day, and that is OK. But if someone solemnly declares and then doubles down on something like there are no potatoes in Glorantha, where’s the fun in that?

If people talk about YGWV only in terms of adding to (whatever happens to be current) canon, that is not really variation. Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend. But you know all this ten times better than I do.

[Qizilbashwoman]

2 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Well, it is not a “dumb theory” in the sense of a stupid theory that we love, but it is stupid.

This is for the Dumbest Theories so here's mine: Muharzam got ganked by Orthanth with the help of a mysterious Bat, but he died-died. The story goes that he was rescued and restored as Yelm thanks to the Lightbringers.

When the Sun returned it was in many faces. Pony Yelm (Kargzant) and Dara Happan Yelm are two famous ones, and in the end it was DH Yelm who won the battle. These Suns were not resolved theologically until Nysalor, but I digress.

What Lightbringer would restore the Tyrant? No, no. Flesh Man. The artist now known as Humakt had slain Grandfather Mortal, his immediate ancestor (grandfather? not sure), and it was Flesh Man (shown "covered in ashes"!) who was restored as Yelm. This was restitution for Humakt's injury. Muharzam's Yelm is just Bijif.

Edited September 9, 2023 by Qizilbashwoman

[scott-martin]

4 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Gorakiki Beetle

Much like the scarab section (theorem XVIII) is the most important part of Monas Hieroglyphica, this may be one of the more important outputs of this thread. The key to illuminated elf consciousness, what Arkat got wrong, the disposition of the bees ("flaxen hair blowing in the breeze" / you want alchemy), a Miyazaki reference and more!

[scott-martin]

1 hour ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

Flesh Man

Hot. Now I wonder if there was a Pelorian Flesh Person in the ancient times, some universal person rune figure who was originally all of us but got lost in all the layers of hierarchy and shit rolling . . . a cult that pops up in generations of extreme social strain to renew the broken universe and relight a dead sun. Maybe this person was what they had up there instead of Yelmalio: the revolutionary recognition that the real sun was inside you all along, you are the central character in the rite when thelemites do Resh vel Helios in its turning: the mythic source of Karvanyar, Yelmgatha, modern Teelo Esta-- hey wait, once again Yelmalio as a woman, what are the odds?

Basko don't get it.

[mfbrandi]

7 hours ago, scott-martin said:

the disposition of the bees

The bees and Babs threads made me come over all Egyptian (in characteristicly clumsy fashion). And Zac’s ID image made me think again about the CB’s iconography. If we prose Bobby (whose name drops a hint), will it seem less like doggerel?

• Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favour fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate to say that for destruction ice is also great and would suffice.

Darkness (cold, ice) came from Chaos, and we might expect that to be reversible. Darkness and Fire will loop happily in time, but this being time, it won’t go on forever. Is there an exit from Fire to Chaos? What will the Gloranthan apocalypse look like? It is no good asking ZZ — he swings both ways.

Edited September 9, 2023 by mfbrandi
adj. —> adv.

[mfbrandi]

This tickled me:

• After a brief survey of different Egyptological approaches to myth (Assmann, Zeidler, Goebs), Quirke suggests that myths might have been learned through nonlinguistic “information blocks,” rooted in image and performance, which were only translated into words “when some gain offset the effort … [of transforming] fuzzy prototype concepts into rigorous concepts with checklists of features”
  
  — Joshua A. Roberson on Stephen Quirke’s Exploring Religion in Ancient Egypt

[mfbrandi]

21 hours ago, jajagappa said:

Trollkin marinated in ghost pepper oil?

Since reading that, I have been wondering about the zombie creation process: squirt a cup of 1,041,427 SHU down the gullet of a corpse and see it jump up ready for the fight?

[scott-martin]

1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

Darkness (cold, ice) came from Chaos, and we might expect that to be reversible. Darkness and Fire will loop happily in time, but this being time, it won’t go on forever. Is there an exit from Fire to Chaos? What will the Gloranthan apocalypse look like? It is no good asking ZZ — he swings both ways.

Funny story. 

People don't talk about it much now but the major conflict of the Broken Council LARP (memorialized in the modern ouranekki board layout) revolved around whether the New God would get its initial education from Day (light gods, emergent Dara Happa, elves) or Dark (the rump IFWW alliance of OOO, storm and trolls). In canonical history the Day faction got the votes and this is how you get Nysalor, the exit from Fire to what chaos-rejecting cultures reject. 

So the apocalypse already happened, it was literally how the light got in. ZZ was of course ultimately arrayed on the other side: burned by the light like a shadow burned into the walls of Watchmen. But I think the light by definition can't see in the dark the way ZZ grudgingly makes out shapes and movement. The sun in the sky might cast a shadow but has only abstract experience of the night. Some people think Shargash was a sun once and Alkoth is hell. In that scenario, Shargash and ZZ may sometimes provide reciprocal initiation . . . other times they fight like Ernalda and Dendara, jealous of their fine distinctions.

I think pumping corpses full of the spiciest "zombie sauce" (probably with beetle gland extracts) to jolt them to an unholy parody of life is brilliant and should be canonical. It's literally the fire within, the one thing a troll can't quite digest and so it keeps the body warm and twitching, constantly rejecting the intrusion like an autoimmune disorder, the bite of forbidden fruit you can't swallow or spit out. God only knows what it does to the living, probably instant illumination. 

Where it gets dumb is that IMG this is also Tanian, the impossible element that the Jrustelans brought down from their beetle-infested mountain and sprayed on their mucoid seafaring rivals. That one is theoretically spicy "water" but the standard elemental progressions are breaking down for me these days, the part of the world where they came of age didn't have much room for darkness as an element and the primary antagonism for fire was water. In this model, fire is the alien from the absolute elsewhere . . . the sky is dominated by a "nuclear chaos," if you will. Water steps up to shield the world from it in much the same way darkness operates in the old Council system.

Note that this means the waertagi overwhelmed by tanian sauce work their way back up from hell through sheer persistence (they are unkillable twitch machines now, alive with flavor) and a wink around the whirlpool.

By the way everything here has been great. I have been distracted but am flying to California incredibly early tomorrow and hope the office will calm down after that as the Issaries community continues to evolve.

Edited September 9, 2023 by scott-martin
cocktail / sauce

[mfbrandi]

46 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

But I think the light by definition can't see in the dark the way ZZ grudgingly makes out shapes and movement.

The Fire-Sky mob have the wrong model of vision: they think it is all about sending out laser beams from their eyes, so they see nothing (having long ago burned out their retinas with the reflections), day or night. For ZZ, since swallowing Aether, making sense of the fiery photonic world is not a matter of vision — it is proprioception, kinesthesis.

Darkness sits in that happy place: is it the Void, all reception, or is it Water, seeping in everywhere?

55 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

the sky is dominated by a “nuclear chaos,” if you will.

Yes, I will. Chaos as creation — building the (chemical) elements up from hydrogen — but some can see only fission, tearing apart; too long spent staring into the mirror.

[mfbrandi]

4 hours ago, scott-martin said:

the standard elemental progressions are breaking down for me these days … fire is the alien from the absolute elsewhere … the sky is dominated by a “nuclear chaos”

Prospective life-cycle for Our Lady of the Chaos Sun:

That takes in all the elements, right? Oh, him. We do not speak of him.

[davecake]

On 8/5/2023 at 4:44 AM, John Biles said:

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

Not true of the Eastern sources, in which Mashunasan (Buddha) manages to sit passively pursuing enlightenment, AND save the world twice. 

[John Biles]

1 hour ago, davecake said:

Not true of the Eastern sources, in which Mashunasan (Buddha) manages to sit passively pursuing enlightenment, AND save the world twice. 

The biggest difference between Glorantha's mystics and Buddhism is that Buddhists have compassion as an element of the eight-fold path and Goranthan mystics think there is no good or evil, just relative positions they've risen above. 

[mfbrandi]

Gloranthan Karaoke

The big O recalls young love gone bad — and feels sorry for himself, naturally. How did the partners in crime fall out? (Any suggestion that he just couldn’t keep his weapon in its scabbard …)

• Far off and long ago
  She came when I was young
  A silver moon shining in her eyes
  And strange the song she sang
  
  All so easy I trusted her
  I thought she was my friend
  Now the only place for me
  Is down in the swallow wind

[ZedAlpha]

Tired: Multiple Argrath Hypothesis. Yeah, this is getting decanonized, but it still makes a bunch of sense and at this point is one of the coldest YGWV takes out there.

Wired: Multiple Harrek Hypothesis. Harrek the Berserk is also a character that does way too much and is in way too many places for one person, and he dies and comes back to life multiple times to the point that it might stretch the belief of even one demigod's heroism.

But what if Harrek isn't a person so much as a title? Yes, my friends, I'm talking about the Gloranthan Dread Pirate Roberts!

The original Harrek the Berserk absolutely slew his people's Bear God and skinned it, gaining much power, but at some point he probably died permanently or retired and passed the mantle of the Bear down to the next most vicious and horrible of his pirate crew. And so on. How did Harrek survive the terrible battles that destroyed the Kethaelan navy? Barely! Then he decided to take his share of the plunder and retire back to the Three Step Isles, passing it off to his second-in-command. How did Harrek survive Pennel Ford? He didn't! But another Wolf Pirate took up the mantle shortly after the original Harrek got Jar-Eel'd.

In this view, Gunda the Guilty serves to help choose who the next Harrek is, which is why she's so feared--becoming Harrek is as much a punishment and a death sentence as it is a reward and a mighty boon of powerful magic. It also explains Harrek's wildly varying characterization (is he a wonderful friend of the common man and a boon companion of Argrath, or the worst reaver and an irredeemable monster? Yes! 'Cause there's been more than one Harrek!)