Your Dumbest Theory

[mfbrandi]

56 minutes ago, ZedAlpha said:

[Is Harrek] a wonderful friend of the common man and a boon companion of Argrath, or the worst reaver and an irredeemable monster?

Yeah, but these things seem to go so well together, even IRL:

• says, “Common man good, elites bad!”
• is an irredeemable monster
• likes to hang out with other grade A nutjobs

Not that one would want to give real-life examples the oxygen of publicity by naming them here … or (per Linda Smith) even the oxygen of oxygen.

So have as many Harreks as you like — for excellent reasons or for none at all: it is all good, and I am not here to piss on your chips — but do we need multiple Harreks to explain these data? 😉

I do like your bear god that gets its revenge from beyond the grave — aided and abetted by Gunda — by possessing Harrek after Harrek. When the number of concurrent Harreks starts to increase exponentially, I predict a mighty winter will come. (Don’t worry, I have been harvesting the fingernails and toenails of the fallen and have them stashed where no one will find them. Hmm, what’s that? Maybe you are right, and I should have burned them.)

Edited September 12, 2023 by mfbrandi
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[ZedAlpha]

1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

Yeah, but these things seem to go so well together, even IRL:

• says, “Common man good, elites bad!”
• is an irredeemable monster
• likes to hang out with other grade A nutjobs

Not that one would want to give real-life examples the oxygen of publicity by naming them here … or (per Linda Smith) even the oxygen of oxygen.

So have as many Harreks as you like — for excellent reasons or for none at all: it is all good, and I am not here to piss on your chips — but do we need multiple Harreks to explain these data? 😉

Oh, not at all, but to be completely honest, but it'd be hilarious, especially given this:

1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

I do like your bear god that gets its revenge from beyond the grave —aided and abetted by Gunda — by possessing Harrek after Harrek. When the number of concurrent Harreks starts to increase exponentially, I predict a mighty winter will come.

Heh. Maybe multiple Harreks start popping up simultaneously during the Windstop and the Long Winter, either as a secondary cause or a side effect? Could explain why they're doing so many things apparently at the same time.

Oh, that's a fun idea for a Hero Wars plot: the White Bear possesses a bunch of pirates all at once, and Gunda forces a the poor bewildered bastards to Heroquest to resurrect the god while there's so much divine upheaval going on.

[mfbrandi]

The illumination powergame has reared its ugly head, again. I would be tempted to cut it off at the knees, like this:

• not being illuminated is like believing in fairies
• if I stop believing in fairies, Tinkerbell and her friends die
  — or at least, I cannot see, hear, smell, taste, or feel fairies, any more
  — and they cannot find a trace of me, either
• fairies = gods = magic
• so I can join the cults of Tinkerbell and Anti-Tinkerbell, Puck and all of Puck’s many enemies
  — and of their spirits of reprisal, I see no sign
• I walk through the magical fire and detection spells of my enemies and I am untouched and unseen
  — fabulous, I think
• so now I try to learn all that incompatible rune magic
  — but nothing, no deal, not happening
• it starts to dawn on me
  — you were way, way ahead of me, of course!
  — that I have cut myself off from all magic
  — I have no spells or magical abilities, none, not a sausage
• so you can no longer take me out with a well-aimed sunspear,
  — but a rusty old fruit knife will likely do the job

For the illuminate who just wants to raise brocaded carp and chat philosophy with her friends, this is no real inconvenience. Around the pond, they joke that a goal is scored or it is not scored, that no one was ever a little bit pregnant. Rice, tea, laughter.

The powertrippers are actively trying to cultivate new and interesting forms of occlusion and doublethink in the hope of arresting the metamorphosis midway/punching loopholes in the firewall. Those who fail (or are failed by their tormentors) are hopelessly insane. Those who succeed? Not IMG: illumination is not a process, not a journey.

The Empire’s attempts to weaponise “illumination” by folding, spindling, and mutilating the aspirant illuminates they so closely supervise makes the White Moonies very angry— “perversion of Goddess Nature,” they call it — but it is OK, they have a tambourine walking meditation to calm themselves down.

[I climb down off my soapbox, and I kick it into small fragments. Honest. You will never see it, again. Umm … who am I kidding?]

[ZedAlpha]

yeah, if Illumination is recognizing the illusory nature of Glorantha and becoming more cognizant of and one with that illusion, power itself would be just as illusory and hard to wield by squishy dumb mortals without supreme effort. True Dragons are literally dilt buifferent.

[Joerg]

Halwal failed to re-unite Arkat because he left out the most powerful remnant of Arkat's magic still active in the world - the curse on Dorastor.

Let me explain (spoilered non-dumb reasoning): 

Dorastor 

Spoiler

 started out as the second seat of what started as the Unity Council, settled early in the Second Century by settlers from Dragon Pass. These settlers found rudimentary functional ruins of a lost advanced civilization, the Feldichi, who had left many Science-Fantasy like achievements in sometimes only partial disfunciton behind. That discovery attracted the keenest heads and the most curious or power-searching individuals into this (then) sween and green country, a valley (or two) nested into the place where the Rockwood Mountains met the foothills of Top of the World.

The discoveries made in the Feldichi ruins advanced the magic of the Second Council greatly, leading to re-creation of lost races or the creation of new ones, like the wyrms.

Selective bias turned the Orlanthi outside of this new, bustling center of magic and urban activity into a more conservative bunch, a trend which contributed to the split among the Orlanthi between those who followed the King of the Heortlings and those who remained on the side of the Dorastan elites who had allied with the Dara Happans, resulting in the Broken Council.

The break-up occurred over the God Project, though not exactly about whether a new god should be created, but how it should be created, with the trolls and possibly the Aramites protesting that it would be too much of a light deity while the Heortling king may have seen himself as defender of the Compromise. The personal feud between Lokamayadon and a minor hero from the Berennethtelli tribe and extended family support against the massacre memorized in the Immolation Song of Brolarulf contributed greatly to the split between the Heortlings and Dorastor. Survivors of the affected Berennethtelli family fled to the Verge (aka the Good Place or the Pol Joni March) and included the parent(s) of Harmast.

During the Gbaji Wars, the illuminated defenders of Dorastor drew more and more onto the powers of Chaos to defend against the growing threat of Arkat. There had been previous use of Chaos by the Bright Empire, like granting the Telmori the shapechanging ability into demigod-like beast form without having to resort to rune magic, but as Arkat advanced into Dragon Pass, more and more Chaos was called upon by the defenders/conquerors of those lands, which in turn drove Arkat into his troll metamorphosis.

After his victory over Nysalor, Arkat cursed the Feldichi ruins and whatever magic they had brought into the world. The once fertile valley(s) had been devastated by the warfare between the trolls on one side and the increasingly chaotic defenders on the other side, and were an apocalyptic hellhole already without Arkat's curse, with lesser manifestations of Chaos running loose but on the whole survivable, e.g. by the Poisonthorn aldryami or a very small community of Theyalan survivors hanging onto Dorasta's Cleft, the main Earth Temple of the valley(s) and left alone even by Arkat's madness and rage.

The Seshnegi God Learner victory over Paslac and the Stygian Autarchy opened the way for Jrusteli explorers to Kartolin Pass, and beyond. Armed with stolen Arkati knowledge, they ignored the curse uttered by Arkat (printed verbatim in the Guide) and began researching what was left of Feldichi knowledge, e.g. in murals or reliefs of the Feldichi ruins that might have escaped Arkat's iconoclasm. These being unsatisfactory, an especially "bright" team of God Learners quested to revive Ralzakark as a witness to what went on, and this led to Arkat's Curse being enacted at full power (despite Arkat having been cut off from the World).

As a result, we god the Great Gorp of Dokat, increased chaos in the Ash Flats and adjacent parts, and (according to Sandy Petersen's Secrets of Glorantha panels at Kraken Convention) the completely chaotic hidden valley beween the Ralian side of the Rockwall watershed and the Erinflarth catchment side of the watershed.

Dorastor contains Arkat's curse on the Feldichi ruins (explicit in his mention of Dokat in the Guide p.342, sidebar), and any quester seeking to re-unite all those fragments of Arkat probably has to go to the heart of what the gorp has left of Dokat and quest towards Arkat's star from there. Killing the giant gorp, luring it away, or finding a way to survive inside the gorp are minor preliminary tasks yet to do.

[mfbrandi]

54 minutes ago, Joerg said:

the most powerful remnant of Arkat's magic still active in the world – the curse on Dorastor.

DUMB THEORY:

• Arkat didn’t curse Dorastor
  he blessed it to make it a paradise
  for the Arkat fragment/s known as “Ralzakark”

[Harry the Dirty Dog]

On 9/16/2023 at 10:29 PM, mfbrandi said:

DUMB THEORY:

• Arkat didn’t curse Dorastor
  he blessed it to make it a paradise
  for the Arkat fragment/s known as “Ralzakark”

All the Argraths (every last one of them) are just fragments of Arkat.

Bring back Arkat = Unifying the Argraths.

[mfbrandi]

5 hours ago, Harry the Dirty Dog said:

Bring back Arkat = Unifying the Argraths.

Ah, but Arkat fragments are like magnetic monopoles all with the same “charge” — they resist being squished together. But they want to unite, they want it so badly. It is thought that that is why they are always so angry. They can fission, but they cannot fuse, and only falling into the Black Hole — the Great Fear — will give them peace.

Any suggestion that this is behind “the Ralzakark project” is entirely …

[mfbrandi]

One for our onlie begetter:

• Syncretism, ever increasing in popularity, in fact worked against any trend toward monotheism that henotheism might have aroused. True unity of two gods occurs only with the daily fusion of Re and Osiris in the underworld. This coalescing of the solar and chthonic is a principle of extreme importance for the understanding of Egyptian religion.
  — Edward Wente, Review of Erik Hornung’s Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt

It seems to me — though perhaps my vision is distorted in all kinds of ways, and I’m no expert in anything — that maybe Egyptian myth doesn’t get the love it might in Gloranthaville. Especially given the suspicion that Orlanth and Eurmal are inseparable — ‘only Orlanth can (sometimes) control him’ —> ‘only Orlanth can (sometimes) control his own worst impulses’ — isn’t it tempting to see Orlanth as a Seth/Sutekh figure?

Click for Egyptian Chaos theory:

Spoiler

• The ‘one’, argues Hornung, is never a particular god … We have to look beyond deity in order to discover the primal ‘one’. For there is a force at work in a ‘deeper’ realm than that inhabited by the gods. This is the realm of the ‘nonexistent’ … Outside of the undifferentiated nonexistent, we find a multiplicity of objects in the ‘creation’ … Only in the uncreated realm of the nonexistent is there no differentiation, and no decay and death. Ultimately, even the gods surrender claims to immortality, but the nonexistent endures.

  What is this nonexistent? The serious scholar … could have quite a lot of fun with it. Buddhists will find elements squaring well with the doctrine of Sunyata, the Void, while mystics may recognise in Hornung's ‘pleroma’ a primordial Urgrund out of which the created world came …

  But to the main point. It is clear that the Egyptian gods are part of a created and non-eternal realm, and multiplicity is a necessary feature of that realm. So even when the Egyptians conceived of a creator god, they understood that he owed his existence to the creative principle within the nonexistent.

  — Jeff Zerbst, Review of Erik Hornung’s Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt
   

• According to the Egyptians the world is surrounded spatially by an ever-threatening chaos. This negative chaos, symbolized by the archdemon Apopis, also confines, according to Hornung, the existential order temporally, providing a beginning and end. Thus he regards Apopis as more immortal than the gods and states: ‘Evil is inherent in the nonexistent and hence is older than the gods and present in the world from the beginning’. Here he is imparting greater negative value to precreation than is perhaps warranted. There are texts treating precreation more as a kind of positive monism, containing the potential energies involved in creation …

  While the eschaton might be viewed as a threat to created world order, it was not always totally negative, as, for example, in the final spell of the Book of Two Ways, where the end of all provides the means whereby the deceased … enters timelessness and his ba (roughly ‘soul’) attains rebirth into the cycle of divine time. Here we might speak of paradigmatic eschatology, where the end of all serves as a model for the deceased's benefit. In fact, the earlier versions of creation … are less explanations of origins than paradigms for the deceased’s renewal.

  — Edward Wente, Review of Erik Hornung’s Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt

[mfbrandi]

Gloranthan Karaoke

15 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Uncle ZZ … slaps her on the back and says, “Girl’s alright with me … Actor–model–waiter: more blood beer over here!”

Spit and sawdust? More blood and ground glass — black, of course. The band lurches into Bowie’s first great tune (one that echoes through the back alleys of Viriconium):

• [ZZ]
  Sighing, we swirl through the streets like the crust of the sun
  The Bloodbeer Brothers

• [BG]
  In our wings that bark
  Flashing teeth of brass
  Standing tall in the dark

• [Both]
  Oh, and we were gone
  Hanging out with your dwarf men
  We were so turned on
  By your lack of conclusions

• [BG]
  Well, I was stone, he was wax
  So he could scream and still relax — unbelievable!
  And we frightened the small children away …

• [ZZ]
  And now the dress is hung, the ticket pawned
  The Factor Max that proved the fact is melted down
  Woven on the edging of my pillow

• [BG]
  And my brother lays upon the rocks
  He could be dead, he could be not, he could be you
  He’s chameleon, comedian, Corinthian, and caricature

• [Both]
  Shooting up pie-in-the-sky
  Bloodbeer Brothers

  In the feeble and the bad
  Bloodbeer Brothers

  In the blessed and cold
  In the Gretsch-hungry dark
  Was where we flayed our mark

  Oh, and we were gone
  Kings of oblivion
  We were so turned-on
  In the mindwarp pavilion

[mfbrandi]

The Caprati are a broo sleeper cell — and only one broo is that organised.

(But this seems so natural that maybe it is canon and I just didn’t get the memo.)

[scott-martin]

Each of the major Troll Gods in that book represents a fundamental approach to Darkness that has as yet resisted consolidation into modern standard Kyger Litor. Shargash appears there but not by that name.

[Nick Brooke]

On 9/12/2023 at 9:35 PM, ZedAlpha said:

How did Harrek survive the terrible battles that destroyed the Kethaelan navy? Barely!

ITYM “Bearly!”

[mfbrandi]

2 hours ago, scott-martin said:

Shargash appears there but not by that name.

This seems so easy that I feel you must be laying a trap for me — surely, it is why the Thin White Duke of the Legions of Death sang:

• Does my face show some kind of glow?

It really wasn’t the side-effects of the cocaine — like the crust of the sun, indeed.

Spoiler

Our guy does seem to believe in a (cosmically) balanced diet. On top of the whole / thing, he consumes (Flamal) to balance , (Krjalk) to balance , and (Krjalk, again — and possibly Pocharngo (‘foul-tasting slime on the sacrifice’)) to balance (Alkor). You are what you eat, and “ev’ry man, master, sir, is destined to eat ’isself.”

I am half expecting him to pop up in an elf cult (we have the quasi-balanced / in the leftovers) — maybe represented by a bonsai sequoia?

If a voice at the back points out that we may also have sloshing about in the divine stomach — and he is only a little guy: how does he fit it all in? — we must recall the cult’s ritual call and response:

• Which one should I kill?
  Whack both.

Is it really not canon, not even European canon?

[davecake]

On 9/10/2023 at 8:08 AM, John Biles said:

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. 

I don't think this is true of East Isles mysticism, or at least not all of it. Not only has Mashunasan saved the world twice, Mairnali is one of the most prominent deities associated with mysticism, and is also very strongly associated with compassion. 

Of Glorantha's schools of mysticism, only Mashunasan is, I think, explicitly intended to have compassion as a central tenet AND to be explicitly analogous to Buddhism. 

Though note also Serelaloon, the Kralori name for Chalana Arroy, is said to be a daughter of Vith, the supreme mystic deity. 

[davecake]

On 9/13/2023 at 6:40 AM, ZedAlpha said:

yeah, if Illumination is recognizing the illusory nature of Glorantha and becoming more cognizant of and one with that illusion, power itself would be just as illusory and hard to wield by squishy dumb mortals without supreme effort. True Dragons are literally dilt buifferent.

Remember, Illusion is temporary reality. Maybe it's just recognising that all reality is temporary on some time scale or other. 

And True Dragons literally turn their dreams into reality. True Dragons know that reality and Illusion are just a matter of perspective better than anyone. Honestly, I think there are some explanations of Dragon magic, including perhaps some from Dragons themselves, that teach that it is all just temporary changes to reality, and therefore Illusion - and 'reality' is just the same with a longer duration. Which is just a detail to an immortal dragon that can sleep through centuries. 

[mfbrandi]

1 hour ago, davecake said:

all just temporary changes to reality, and therefore Illusion - and 'reality' is just the same with a longer duration

Which is why the and gang are pissing in the and/or whistling in the . Rip away the veil of Maya, and all that is left is the Void, Ø, or inscribed differently, .

[Joerg]

Porting over from Axe Hall, where this blabbering has no relevance at all:

 mfbrandi and I were discussing the Obsidian Palace prior to 1318, and further down some ideas about Argan Argar.

2 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

Yeah, after posting, I thought, “Less silicon, more exotic carbon space elevator.”

My current image of the Obsidian Palace is one of capillary glass tubes around the hollow of a central tube which has a spiral stairwell (possibly inside a spiralling tube of its own) with bubble-like chambers, opening out to balconies etc., at least for the first kilometers up.

There is no lift for cargo or personnel, either you climb the stairwell, or you fly up on the outside, with the balconies as roosts.

Darkness is not exactly known to be friendly to birds, while Lodril as Veskarthan is symbolized by a feathered serpent (or atlatl javelin), indicating quite some affinity to feathered life-forms. Which makes me wonder what kind of birds would roost on the flanks of the Shadow Plateau, and formerly on the outside of the spire?

Xentha is a goddess of the sky, and may well have an affinity to birds of the night - owls, nightingales, ... maybe kiwis. And to bats.

The Palace could have been a hang-out for pteranodons.

 

2 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

AA is tricky bugger. I think of him as twiceborn, once in the early universe/underworld (3 curious spirits) and again as a power of the surface — he “acquires” Xentha () as a mother in the same sense that ZZ acquires Fire … perhaps. Fire/Sky and Darkness are intimates from way back — like Jekyll and Hyde — don’t believe the official story that the Earth is mother to Sky and that Xentha is a foreign invader of Sky.

Twiceborn fits somewhat. We never quite learn which sky god (if any) might be Argan Argar's father. His cult write-up tells us he was born (he took on substance other than Darkness) on the arrival at the surface. My best guess is that he remained a bodiless spirit and then took on his divine body walking the Surface World in the womb of Xentha.

Which brings up questions about Xentha.

It is no secret that the sky dome and the bowl of Darkness below meet at the edge of the world, somewhere around or in Sramak's River. There is an Underworld Sky which shows its firmament during the period of the greatest tilt of the Sky Dome, in the low northern sky (between the Gates of Dusk and Dawn) during the long winter nights, meaning that we get to see almost two thirds of the rim stars. That is a realm of Darkness, and gets visible only at night, but the stars there still shed light. (And then there's One Night Wish.)

Xentha's realm extends all the way to Pole Star, except maybe for the hole where the tip of the Spike pierced the Dome, used as exit by the RIng of Orlanth aka the Sky Bear.

Entekosiad has a passage about the White Empress that suggests that before the Sunstop of Brighteye Yelm there may have been a period of a rotating white and dark sun, Sedenya the Turner. If so, Xentha may already have been in the sky before the Brighteye usurpation.

 

2 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

(One version of creation has it that the sun precedes the emergence of the earth(’s erection) from the waters, but that it can only shine after air has separated earth from sky. This is the air helping out — Entekos? — but that doesn’t suit the Umath/Orlanth Oedipal self-image: “The Earth must be my mother, because I want to ‘marry’ him her. I couldn’t possibly have burst through a hole in the Sky.”)

I'll stick to the elemental sequence in the self-construction of Mostal the clockwork snowball globe. First a bowl of Darkness around the base of the Spike (which may well have preceded the Darkness), then filled with (possible ever increasing) water (emitted by the Chaosium, quite possibly spilling out over the rim, creating a disk of water surface around the bowl from angular momentum, into infinity), then a cubic pearl manifesting as Creation from the Chaosium accretes the solid inside the water, slowly pushing up the Spike until it breaks free of the surface of the sea - quite likely leaving some sheer vertical walls to the sides above the sea, too - and then the Underworld Sky inside the Darkness bowl built up by tin mostali to complete the set of upper shells, pivoting on the tip of the Spike. With these done and arranged, Mostal had finished creating himself and his metal-caste helpers. Affix a golden source of light in the upper Sky (or three?), and enjoy. But wait, one of those lights is sent diving down into the Earth, and just 30,000 completions of sets of 294 rotation (or however many days a year had before the Sunstop) of the inner dome (with some precession caught up, so actually one more or less) a new element surfaces, pushing the upper dome of its pivot (but still allowing it to revolve) and the earth cube down into the waters so that water can creep back up on the corners. The Mostali then construct 4 columns in the cardinals of the world to keep the elevated dome from tilting, and for another 40,000 sets of such circles the slightly damaged Mostal remains semi-functional.

The sky is plasma if you want to assign the states of matter to the middle four of the Gloranthan elements. Darkness would be space (possibly a combination of Dark Energy and Dark Matter?), and Moon... possibly vacuum plasma emissions or Bose-Einstein state matter interference? Bah, as irrelevant as the idea of super-critical fluids when liquid and gaseous states become indistinguishable.

Yelm doesn't have to be the first sun. Plentonius posits a quite enormous Age of Aether before that of Yelm in Glorious ReAscent. Sedenya the turning sun (not yet moon) is mentioned, might be his precursor on top of the Spike, a roving searchlight allowing for Darkness up there, so we get both a sun and a not-sun. And Xentha could be a super-conductive plasma absorbing all light emanating from Aether, or simply a light-bending space.

The three curious spirits linger around the Chaosium when they encounter Aether in the preparation stage. ZZ becomes burnt (pre-empting the burning of Wonderhome, becoming the Dark Troll (burnt troll) prototype) but learns that Fire can be stolen, or more likely already steals it but becomes unable to use it until Lightfore unlocks it, AA gains immunity to Heat and Lowfires (giving up Cold?) which allows him to wrestle Lodril,  XU gains insight.

The Dismemberment of Yelm doesn't make the Surface World fall into Darkness immediately, yet it gives way for Xentha to protect the fleeing trolls. The God Learner overviews of how the world looks in the Mythical Maps section fail to account for Xentha until way too late.

[mfbrandi]

Ideas toyed with in the past:

• Because the “true Gloranthan dynamic” is between Yelm and Orlanth,
  we have vs. , so Orlanth is the Devil.
   
• Because is merely everted,
  ZeeZee or [insert favoured Cosmic Fire here] is the Devil.
   
• The Devil is also our saviour through self-submission:
  “So he could scream, and still relax — unbelievable!”
   
• Eurmal ⇒ Orlanth through self-overcoming/repression,
  which is overrated.
   
• Where the uptight and the uncool touch the Void,
  “chaotic features” (which are twisted Cosmos, not pure Chaos) sprout in profusion.
   
• Orlanth entered the universe through a hole in the Sky,
  the Wind from Nowhere.

I humbly recant the first and last of these: Orlanth is not the Devil and did not enter through the hole in the Sky (through which it flips back to Darkness); he is merely a chaotic feature that frothed up around that alarming aperture — alarming because Chaos = Void = Empty Space = Darkness = the Night Sky ⇒ Sky–Fire, every morning.

Orlanth is the Wind from Now–Here: he is the embodiment of his people’s fears of the emptiness of the Void and the fullness of Cosmic Fire. He gusts about turbulently between the two.

[mfbrandi]

58 minutes ago, Joerg said:

the self-construction of Mostal the clockwork snowball globe

I like the simple version of the Uhrwerk universe:

• The Machine had always been
      Perfect
          Static
  Fourteen billion years ago (give or take)
      It began to tick
          Its gears started to wear
  Frankly
      It has been one cock-up after another
          I will see you all in Hell

At least, that is how a dwarf told it me after too many cans of Neck Oil.

[Joerg]

22 hours ago, Joerg said:

Twiceborn fits somewhat. We never quite learn which sky god (if any) might be Argan Argar's father. His cult write-up tells us he was born (he took on substance other than Darkness) on the arrival at the surface. My best guess is that he remained a bodiless spirit and then took on his divine body walking the Surface World in the womb of Xentha.

Unrelated to Argan Argar, but another case of a deity looping into eras of Godtime "before" its birth is Mastakos. (Crossposting this from rpg.net)

The myth of Orlanth descending to drink from the Well of Daliath would be connected to how the Spike implodes and both the Seas and a cone of air rush after to plug the rift in the world. I usually regard the implosion of the Spike as the start of the Greater Darkness, which puts a lot of the initial Chaos invasions in the Lesser Darkness aka Late Storm Age or Late Vingkotling Age. Despite that, we find Orlanth riding Mastakos' chariot happily during the post-Flood Storm Age while the Spike still stood strong.

Likewise Magasta and Brastalos would only meet and unite in the plugging of the Void. Prior to that, Magasta pretty much hid in the Well of Daliath like this myth says Mastakos did - only when the Earth Cube broke into four shards, with the Doom Currents rushing into those breaks, did Magasta emerge and take priority before his siblings Manthi and Natea.
Brastalos had been there since Umath made way for the world storm, she is the eye of the Hurricane which moves around from the center of the Surface World (where she was born) far out into the West in her annual cycle, bringing Outer World storm strength upon the East Isles. Her westernmost passage seems to be out on Sramak's River. That would have given her occasion to meet Lorion, Magasta's nephew.

Mastakos is hardly the only deity whose myths loop willy-nilly through the Ages. His story is that of the charioteer acquired by Orlanth when he underwent the trial of the Baths of Nelat and took a drink from the Well of Daliath. And this story is strong enough that the archetypical charioteer of Orlanth in other stories is identified with this child of Magasta and Brastalos.

When Orlanth had an archetypical Movement Deity as his charioteer during his exploits in Ages of the Godtime that still had the Spike, there is a possibility that whom we don't mention might be another, more important deity, who happens to be Orlanth's maternal grandfather - Larnste, the celestial court god of Movement and Change, including shapechanging, and likely not recognizable as that deity.

King of Sartar lists Uleria as the only Celestial Court Power deity who survived the Destruction of the Spike, but speculates about Larnste also having escaped that cataclysm by changing himself into someone or something else. And after the Spike imploded, Orlanth follows the path of Brastalos (the core of the World Storm which he inherited from Umath), and finds his Cousin/Nephew at the bottom of that well. We certainly have the place and the opportunity, and a correlated Godtime event is as good as we get for time.

 

Why is this a dumb theory? Because it argues from wishing to find a logical sequence in any of this Godtime stuff, which I keep telling myself is possible if you say good-bye to one-on-one identifications of the masks a deity archetype wears in the myths (often played by a mortal wearing a corresponding mask in the holy passion plays about that myth that we call This World Heroquests).

I have a visualization of Godtime stories as looping lines around a central Spike, following the trail of a single protagonist with a general progress from Creation to the end of the Greater Darkness, although the trail may go up and down a couple of times while surrounding the central Spike. These lines enter the realms of Events, which may be simplified as separate story lines intersecting or joining in an archetypical story. That would be a story with an architecture told again and again with different protagonists and antagonists, with some stories even acknowledging an "earlier" form. Stories told by humans to humans only need to have enough internal consistence for that one story to steer around its major plotholes, it doesn't have to conform with all other stories about that protagonist and her companions that are around to be capital t Truth by simile.

Myths are there to give a good story explaining why the world is as it is, or how it changed from a world we know that was into what came after. So we have the disappearance of the embodiment of order, purpose and fixed shape in the center of the world, the Spike, and the two fluid elements of the surface world rusing into that void. The result is the marriage of the Eye of the Storm with the Whirlpool that becomes the Homeward Ocean, and an unprecedented access for Storm to the deepest and secret parts of the seas. That access comes with some cost and trials - whether in the myth about Orlanth retrieving Mastakos only by suffering the searing Baths of Nelat, or in the studies in self-discipline aka Perfect Stillness Kahar has to undergo to become a viable suitor for Harantara.

And we have the archetype of the charioteer with the movement rune. We get Ronance the Earth Charioteer, we get Lightfore the charioteer of the true, inaccessible sun, an entity of unlimited movement until the Bridling of Kargzant event, we get the storm charioteer Varnaval with his chariot drawn by ordeeds, and now we find a water deity with a wheeled chariot drawn by sheep in the depths of the ocean.

Wheels.

In the churning depths of the oceans.

Sure, where else?

Or we might have the Mover and Changer, giving his translocation to the various environments, required to entrap the Void replacing the Spike by giving Magasta's Pool that rotational energy, but now released back into the crumbling world to enable other movement, like the (highly necessary) Westfaring.

Where we have an annual re-enactment of the Westfaring by the movement of the Doldrums in the weather patterns of the world. Brastalos being in two places at once, the doldrums and that column of air going down into Magasta's Whirlpool.

Different angles to look at these stories.

[mfbrandi]

On 9/25/2023 at 12:34 PM, Joerg said:

We never quite learn which sky god (if any) might be Argan Argar's father.

Why does he need a father, and why a sky father? (I know you are only asking, not dictating, but rhetoric is rhetoric.)

If — like XU & ZZ — he is straight out of Darkness/Nakala (no other “parent” needed: Darkness condensed/manifest/specialised), he later takes Xentha as symbolic mother or magical enabler: Xentha is Darkness’ mastery of Sky; this accomplished, AA can colonise the surface world.

Or, you know, something a bit like that.

[mfbrandi]

“Flap, flap, flap — look at me! What am I?”

The Crimson Bat is not a bat: it is a play on words.

Steed of the Goddess? Glorantha’s Mrs. Peel is her own weapon of mass destruction.

Edited September 26, 2023 by mfbrandi
:

[Joerg]

2 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

Why does he need a father, and why a sky father? (I know you are only asking, not dictating, but rhetoric is rhetoric.)

Maybe because all sky-related entities have fathers, even if there may be no mother.

2 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

If — like XU & ZZ — he is straight out of Darkness/Nakala (no other “parent” needed: Darkness condensed/manifest/specialised), he later takes Xentha as symbolic mother or magical enabler: Xentha is Darkness’ mastery of Sky; this accomplished, AA can colonise the surface world.

Or, you know, something a bit like that.

Argan Argar's cult in RQ2 Trollpak present him as first god of Darkness born on the surface to Xentha, who was among those who fled Hell when dead Yelm descended - possibly before he even reached Wonderhome.

If AA was another parthenogenetic child of Nakala, we would be talking about ZZ, AA and XU as triplets. Instead, ZZ and XU are the manifestation of the original Twins with the Darkness rune.

AA is a wisp of Darkness either losing his Cold in the curious spirits event or never inheriting it from his mother Xentha when manifesting on the surface.

AA becomes something like Darkfore, the helpful Darkness entity roaming the surface world, helping peoples to survive. And possibly, like Lightfore, he collects other identities to become the one remaining guardian of his element.

 

[scott-martin]

1 minute ago, Joerg said:

Maybe because all sky-related entities have fathers, even if there may be no mother.

A close reading of his nativity narrative and the fact that his signature spell is Suppress "Aether" tell me a lot about his unacknowledged paternity. I have THOUGHTS on him and Xentha and the primeval earth cults of the Shadow Plateau (and the female nature of the bat) but am distracted elsewhere.