Your Dumbest Theory

[mfbrandi]

On 12/18/2023 at 3:12 PM, Joerg said:

Why did you not use the mirror rune, ?

Reflect  in one to go from randomness to primitive pattern, ?
Build a kaleidoscope to transform into ?
Whichever — but note that (and ) already had mirror symmetry.
(The awkward squad are , , and — of course.)
Once upon a time, (in LRT drag) vs. replaced vs. in the Ten Ancient Polarities — “Power runes in tapping joke shocker,” the papers scream — and our lightbulb/candlesnuff moment told us that these were distinctions without differences, didn’t it?

Whither “honour your mistake as a hidden intention”? Panditji — my please-don’t-call-me-your-guru — says, “Intention is Brownian motion in a hall of mirrors.” But I am just looking for the exit.

[scott-martin]

57 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

I am loving these. It strikes me that perversely reflects the full indeterminacy of the Heisenberg wave (as I barely recall from hippie books) while  describes the situation that precipitates in the wave collapse.  as the die that spins, the sum total of possible outcomes, as the die that stops and reveals how it goes for you now . . . in some ways the opposite of how we might interact with the runes but when considered as "our" luck and the statistical web of branching paths it adds up. Either way, cut the radial symmetry fromand see the  revealed.

1 hour ago, Kloster said:

I see more the Aeolians as Glotanthan equivalents of the Hazaras, that lives as a homogeneous group, are considered as shi'i muslims by muslims, but as budhists by the budhist world, even if their beliefs include elements of mongolian shamanism.

I love this also (from elsewhere) because it makes them sound like sufis or rosicrucians to me, a community adroit at adopting the outward philosophical costume of whatever nation of belief they find themselves in. When in Rome, they conform just enough to Catholic norms to be considered a little esoteric but still part of the prevailing in group. When in Benares, they wear a different outfit and blend, and so forth.

This is funny to me because in a recent conversation with the esoteric scouting people a quote came up that set off a cascade of thinking about lightbringer psychology:


"Observe the customs of your tribe." Dress according to the "custom" of the country in which you dwell. As it turns out, the founder of this particular strain of esoteric scouting was a family friend of Manly Palmer Hall so there's a rosicrucian universalism there if you squint, an urge to converge the best parts of every creed in pursuit of something absolutely inclusive: every community, every "tribe" has strength and wisdom behind its dances, respect that and learn from it.

But then we started getting into the "fourfold path" that this particular strain of esoteric scouting derives from the Native American medicine wheel and I realized that the directions are the developed lightbringer professions (healer, trader, scholar, clown) with the core personality in the middle as the "Orlanth." Or in feminist terms the angels rotating around Kate Bush in the "Lily" video as she walks the straight line forward. Anyway a funny thing that might end up productive in the coming year . . . Glorantha as holding environment for realms of the repressed awaiting their return.

Edited December 19, 2023 by scott-martin
dice humor

[mfbrandi]

17 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

Either way, cut the radial symmetry fromand see the  revealed.

Multiply chaos to get (or fake) order. Divide (or mutilate) order to get chaos. Or just play the tape backwards. Chaos as offcuts or Lego bricks. Prime. Irreducible.

It might be objected that the connections between fate and law/order (on the one hand) and between luck/chance and chaos (on the other) are weak — tenuous to the point of being untenable:

• FATE
  A power that some people believe causes and controls all events,
  so that you cannot change or control the way things will happen°
• CHANCE (LUCK)
  The force that causes things to happen
  without any known cause or reason for doing so°°

In the context of power runes, these seem the salient definitions. From the point of view of the wannabe actor, things are much the same: agency — control — is lost. (That agency may be incoherent and control a mirage slips from one’s mind as the universe squishes one between the rocks … again.) Luck and chance are just names we sometimes use for fate when it is inscrutable? Fate even under that name may be capricious and must make us wonder when we are going to see the Goat–Hedgehog Broo of Fate™.

Ø purists, too, may insist that chance conceived of as a power (a force) does not immediately collapse into chaos: makes things happen and causation is a matter of (even if our spade may turn trying to dig back beyond ’s intervention); Ø/ “shows its hand” when things happen for no reason, are uncaused. (Occult causes merely create the impression of chaos.)

When it wants to tease, the Ø whispers to us, “What use is a cause without a cause? If is just and a mirror, might not itself be merely a reflection without a mirror? Poof!”

Spoiler

I think it was Alan Moore — in Sounds, perhaps — who wrote that Hawkwind was a band for those who grasped the arbitrary unfairness of life. It is the arbitrariness that is key. 😉

———————————————————————
° https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/fate
°° https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/chance

[scott-martin]

30 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

When it wants to tease, the Ø whispers to us, “What use is a cause without a cause? If is just and a mirror, might not itself be merely a reflection without a mirror? Poof!”

Yeah, like you I initially gave the  mirror stage a miss but "it's all done with mirrors" is probably one of the revelations the modern Malkionite umma finds so horrendous . . . hits too close to the way Abiding Books are composed with camera lucida rigs, but we digress.

 is the fuzzy derived from rotating around itself

 is the implied revealed when is rotated around itself

or  is to  (as you've already explicated) as  is to .

These are both orientations toward the statistical field that encompasses good things, bad things, good people and bad . . . without always assigning the outcomes we might hope for in our philosophy. 

I wonder if the key is that getting to abstract  requires trimming the outlying "horns" off the modern  . . . I've cleaned it up a tiny bit, the more accurate version may be more of a , the other Krarsht rune. Trim the extreme outcomes from the die roll and you end up with Krarsht, the tyranny of mean statistical reality.

But rotate  and trim the extreme branching paths and you actually end up with , the undifferentiated plenum and mother of creation.

Edited December 19, 2023 by scott-martin
actual conclusions

[mfbrandi]

12 hours ago, scott-martin said:

But rotate  and trim the extreme branching paths and you actually end up with , the undifferentiated plenum and mother of creation.

Chaos is darkness putting out its first tentative pseudopods — Krarsht reaches out hungrily in all directions, naturally — or darkness is chaos retracting its feelers. Chaos reaching out. Darkness turning inward — to examine the light within? Darkness withdrawing — from the painful external stimulus of light?

[mfbrandi]

15 hours ago, scott-martin said:

I wonder if the key is that getting to abstract  requires trimming the outlying "horns" off the modern  . . . I've cleaned it up a tiny bit, the more accurate version may be more of a , the other Krarsht rune.

It is well known that the Our Blessed Mother’s favourite snacks are segments of Toblerone (the West made far too much of the “one” there: logic is breakfast, but it always returns us to zero) and Terry’s Chocolate Orange (orange: the colour of storm — who broke the previously perfect change rune and must be consumed to fix it).

Much to its annoyance, stasis allows the construction of so much: , , , and , certainly. The ghost of Euclid assures me that geometric construction is not change: all our results are contained in our starting point. (Best to ignore the ghost of Frege — you wouldn’t believe the filth he comes out with — but cancellation is what a logician deserves, right?)

When that krarshtkid drops from the ceiling to bite your head clean off with its tripartite mouthparts, remember that it would much rather have had some citrus or honey-and-almond flavoured milk chocolate. It will be a great comfort in your final moments as you plunge toward the sacred data event horizon.

Chaos dwarves — how could they not make sense?
 

        

[scott-martin]

2 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Chaos is darkness putting out its first tentative pseudopods — Krarsht reaches out hungrily in all directions, naturally — or darkness is chaos retracting its feelers. Chaos reaching out. Darkness turning inward — to examine the light within? Darkness withdrawing — from the painful external stimulus of light?

Now that you mention it, IMG one of the alchemical powers of  is that it recedes to become a reservoir of unrealized potentials . . . rotate along all its angles and you end up with something like the black egg of आकाश. This probably has ramifications for the illumination schools ("why has sar arkat gone to the trolls?") but I have little time for that stuff these days.

But giving the Gloranthan five-element system (as eccentric as it initially appears in a sea of paracelsan fantasy references) an ayurvedic origin opens a lot of doors, most importantly giving the taoist 五行 dynamics room to bloom elsewhere on the lozenge. Maybe in hypothetical Vithela every element is raised one step along the spiral, with their  playing the role of the western , their  is the western  and while  and  are still   and , they introduce as the western  at the top before the cycle repeats. So a bit of nuance to their sorcery and of course their alchemy.

[mfbrandi]

59 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

Maybe in hypothetical Vithela every element is raised one step along the spiral, with their  playing the role of the western , their  is the western  and while  and  are still   and , they introduce as the western  at the top before the cycle repeats.

Or to put it plainly:

In Styx, we recognise the slipperiness of the distinction between darkness and water. The uneasy-with-themselves and devious storm cultures dump the “not really an element” thing solely onto moon (not mentioning Aldrya’s wood, at all) and try to put more steps between Umath and chaos (in some spin on that elusive notion), but clearly Umath’s innovation was to introduce a void between fire and earth and to pass off catastrophic change as change tout court. By equating metal with “death” — the sword, after all — are we shifting the meaning a little to political chaos (killing the “head of state”) and industrialised warfare (whether via mass production of cast bronze weapons or via iron-which-is-really-steel)? It would give poor old Kargan Tor something to do, after all ( can take care of conflict). Death can be seen as a necessary “evil,” but post-storm total war is something else? The hypothetical east is just the centre unspun?

Is storm = death/metal, or did not-an-element storm just steal what was already there — as their own myths suggest — and put it to questionable use? Kolat must have kargyraa (now there is a name to conjure with) down pat, but can Orlanth do the death metal growl? If so, was that stolen, too? After all, “metal overcomes wood” elementalises the Mostali–Aldryami beef quite nicely … and suits Staffordian pessimism. However, the Malkion–storm–mortality complex might suggest that we humans are the “little people” unable to abandon our plan to chop down all the trees — a non-Krarsht spin on and , with as a petrol-driven steel saw.

Or — as always — no, no, no, you fool: not that, at all!

[mfbrandi]

19 hours ago, scott-martin said:

 is the implied revealed when is rotated around itself

The minimalist says just drop the top bar — or raise the base — (hinting at and our Laconic friends):

And luck to law rotation has inside and outside versions and doesn’t need three :

And just for the hell of it:

Edited December 20, 2023 by mfbrandi

[mfbrandi]

20 hours ago, scott-martin said:

 is the fuzzy derived from rotating around itself

Finally — I promise — Our Lady of the Waiting Mouth when exploded can look a lot like Mallia — encompassing and :

As the empty set is present in every other, so Krarsht and Mallia are everywhere — stitching the universe together like the Spider’s web they are.

Edited December 20, 2023 by mfbrandi
punchline

[mfbrandi]

Some revere Our Lady as Krarsht Nataraja — if information wants to be expensive, it also wants to be free. The good news is that this sect is less likely to knife you in the ribs than bore you senseless with a lecture on logic or dance notation. Limbs? Tentacles? Dreadlocks? Ethernet cables.

[mfbrandi]

Quote

Interesting — and deliberate — use of words here. The Red Emperor is the Red Goddess’ son. He holds the office of Emperor of Dara Happa. — MOB

Many heterodox Irrippi Ontor researchers — there is some other kind? — maintain that this is a scribal error. “The Red Emperor is the Red Goddess’ sun” was the original wording, they claim. (Suns are sufficiently important that everyone wants at least one in their pocket — witness the whole Elmal fiasco.)

The claim that the Emperor reincarnates may be due to some similar confusion: is it the “many suns” hypothesis or were “many sons” conjectured? Scratching away the mould from poorly stored scrolls — however carefully done — reveals Nothing in alarmingly many cases. Mystery persists.

[mfbrandi]

[mfbrandi]

“Gloranthans are not ideological,” but …

Glorantha is created through processes of mastication, regurgitation, and refection. Likely all traces of the original meal have long since escaped the messy process of transmission — as if they were never there. If the meal sometimes tastes a bit funny, those who have chewed before you may have been conservative, authoritarian, and against logic. Yeats could write, “Democracy is dead and force claims its ancient right.”°

With that health warning about peddlers of “philosophies” out of the way, enjoy this:

• The poet tended to explain these grim facts with his politico-historical system which traced a cyclical pattern of zenith and nadir and according to which an indeterminate period of violence and anarchy occurred when civilization trembled at the end of one era and on the brink of another …

  Yeats’s letters to Olivia Shakespeare of 24 July 1934 and 7 August 1934 concerning the phases of civilization are interesting:
  
    • The Earth — Every early nature dominated civilization.
    • The Water — An armed sexual age, Chivalry, Froissart’s Chronicle.
    • The Air   — From the Renaissance to the end of the nineteenth century.
    • The Fire  — The Purging away of our civilization by our hatred …
  
    • First age, earth, vegetative functions.
    • Second age, water, blood, sex.
    • Third age, air, breath, intellect.
    • Fourth age, fire, soul, etc …
  
  He retired from politics and proceeded to wait for the end of the ‘period of plasticity’, and the dawn of an age of strength and force which his philosophy of history promised as imminent. The poetry of these years is full of ‘hatred’ and ‘blood’.
  
  — Mary Carden,
  — The Few and the Many: An Examination of W. B. Yeats’s Politics
  — (Studies, Spring 1969)

If you have access to JSTOR, the paper is a fun read, bringing in Swift, Vico, and (blink and you will miss him) Spengler — and even tackles the “F” word, which I won’t.

Storm is about to blow itself out, and the Fourth Age’s harsh axe will be — from some points of view — a necessary purgative?

————————————————————
° The Letters of W. B. Yeats. Alan Wade. p. 682.

Edited December 28, 2023 by mfbrandi
bullets

[mfbrandi]

53 minutes ago, Ynneadwraith said:

Heroquesting, to me, is essentially a route into the mythic source-code of the universe (if you'll pardon the prosaic analogy).

No pardon required. Why does Godtime contain ‘contradictions’? Because it is a version control system.

Rune magic is software as a service, and heroquesters are all about getting their chosen (or newly written) magic-cum-code hosted on as many servers as possible. All those sacrificed POW points are being used to run data centres.

We are used to thinking of (or , because we used to be rune poor) opposing , but really the balance is between the bit bucket — Kajabor as the black hole — and this somewhat esoteric entity:

Under normal circumstances, ‘code’ (myth-as-magic) is not overwritten, but it may be all-but-forgotten in the branches and never compiled and run. But Chaos is not shy about sending stuff to /dev/null. This makes some Gloranthan admins antsy — they don’t like their cheese to , and they suffer from anxiety. They need to get over it — resources are finite.

The Devouring Mother grasps the whole picture — although her cultists are as clueless (wittering on about the A Series and the B Series) as they are vicious as they are expendable, she assures me — and doesn’t our mystery rune look just like her work?

Spoiler

Don’t worry:

• It is just a metaphor (which probably broke down paragraphs ago; I am no coder).
• Magical effects are mundane world effects, not VR light shows.

[Joerg]

21 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Under normal circumstances, ‘code’ (myth-as-magic) is not overwritten, but it may be all-but-forgotten in the branches and never compiled and run. 

Myth is the Gloranthan DNA. A certain portion of myth was collected as the Web of Arachne Solara, with read access and replication of it in the form of magic. A lot of myth was inserted by mutation, but few of that mutated sequences get expressed in the body of Glorantha. These strands of myth are there, and may provide structural support to other expressions of myth, but they don't provide the magic unless accessed off the beaten paths - not rune magic, but heroic feats. Although worship can lead to regular expression of such feats as rune magic.

[mfbrandi]

3 hours ago, Joerg said:

Myth is the Gloranthan DNA.

Or more generally *nucleic acid, and Krarsht’s “twin sister” gives us the other metaphor. The Devouring Mother has an interest in viruses, too. Plausibly, both are interested in dematerialisation — do more with less!

Perhaps, as the Buserian–Lhankor Mhy thread suggests, counting gods is a fool’s game. No entity without identity?

[Joerg]

3 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Perhaps, as the Buserian–Lhankor Mhy thread suggests, counting gods is a fool’s game. No entity without identity?

There are bound to be many names for parts of the elephant. Some archetypes have a higher deity or principle beyond normal understanding. Sometimes deities we perceive as antithetical may share aspecthoood of one greater truth while differing in other aspects, possibly mapped to or derived from different entities ("parents").

 

[scott-martin]

Among the malkionites there have always been marginal schools or sects so unschooled and emotionally impoverished that they insist in the physical reality of "Solace," as though it were some actual place set aside for the transmigration of the elect within Time. While the orthodox dismiss the teaching as harpazism (one of the projective fallacies), nonetheless it appears in the Abiding Book and so will be with us as long as there are desperate people who feel they have no place else to go.

Unsubstantiated accounts of mass disappearances in times of social and tectonic strain contribute to the persistence of this belief. These people went somewhere out of this world, the faithful and unlettered say, a step ahead of death into the absolute elsewhere. So far these are facts of religious history.

MGF suggests that these people have been warehoused somewhere and will be released before Time runs out. Call it a back door from Brithos if you like. It will be shocking and awful as the vanished-but-not-dead come home. This is especially distressing for the functionally immortal, who worked really hard for nothing in the long run.

[mfbrandi]

On 1/4/2024 at 4:14 AM, scott-martin said:

MGF suggests that these people have been warehoused somewhere and will be released before Time runs out … It will be shocking and awful as the vanished-but-not-dead come home.

What if — per the panel — they have all gone to the Moon, stored inside like Kinder Surprise toys? They might be “coming home” a lot sooner than planned, but in what condition?

Two scenarios for the raptured at Argrathmageddon:

• They come tumbling out of the middle air with the Moon fragments, and at ground zero they alone are unharmed — but are they delighted to see the corpses of unbelievers or puzzled to see a hell at the end of its useful life rather than a paradise?
   
• The ultra-secret and super-sensitive function of the dragons is to dispose of the saved, for they are too smug to be allowed their escape, which had been clogging up the life–death cycles of the world, anyway … and so Argrath finally gets a motivation we can understand.

[Soundtrack by WSB/Material, of course.]

[mfbrandi]

On 12/19/2023 at 11:05 PM, scott-martin said:

I wonder if the key is that getting to abstract  requires trimming the outlying “horns” off the modern  … I've cleaned it up a tiny bit, the more accurate version may be more of a , the other Krarsht rune. Trim the extreme outcomes from the die roll and you end up with Krarsht, the tyranny of mean statistical reality.

Specifically — Asrelia’s dice monkeys tell me — the middle result (median) of three dice. As you add more dice, you get bell-like kinks. This underlines the long-known connection between and (which has the same components as ).

Sorcerers who insist that the Invisible God doesn’t play dice are trying to have the casinos shut down.

Somewhere, nuns are rolling (un)holy knucklebones. Enough tosses, they say — nine billion, perhaps — and the universe will ring at its resonant frequency … and shatter.
 

[mfbrandi]

[See the discussion of the stranger at the hearth here and following.]

Long ago but only a few streets from here, a holy woman in rags — with half a skull for a begging bowl — buttonholed me:

• No! No! No! It is not that guests are sometimes divine. Guests are always divine. And it is transitive: the host hosts the guest and the guest hosts the deity, so the host hosts the deity, too. This is true for every guest–host relationship: it is sacred. We all know this. But tell me, young one, how are we to understand it?
  
  In Time — they invented capital letters just for that, you know — it is impossible for guests to be immortal pseudopods pushed through from some otherworld. [She wiggled her fingers … obscenely?] “The Compromise forbids it,” we are told. [She sneered.] A guest’s body is a mortal body, and the timeless may not act upon it — for that which is outside of time cannot act, at all.
  
  There was no time before time. There is no realm beside time — what nonsense! That which cannot touch us may as well not be there. Do we begin to have a glimmer of something, eh? Does it slip through our fingers, little one? [That wiggle again.]
  
  And that is the mystery — of Malkion? Daka Fal? Our Lady? »Hah!« — a liminal figure standing between what is (the mortal world, time) and what is not (the divine, the void) and partaking fully of each. As do we all, my child, as do we all …
  
  Where does the sun go when it sets, stripling? I tell you that time passes for the sun while we are in the dark. The land of the dead is not separate from this world, and youngster … I fear that it is empty.

As my hairs grey and come in thinner each year, I think of this meeting more often. I wonder what is lost and what spurious matter added in each rehearsal of it. I cannot shake the feeling that it was a meeting with myself, that I shall some day turn a corner to find a young boy whose eyes say that he has been expecting me.

Edited January 9 by mfbrandi
spurious whitespace

[mfbrandi]

Jar-eel the Razoress can be difficult to get a handle on. Rather than think of her as a heroine, it might be easier to think of her as the Moon Goddess incarnated in the world … But … Jar-eel is a mortal woman.
— Jeff Richard

That is, she is the Goddess when she comes down — crosses over — an avatar. Jar-eel is the saguna (with qualities) expression of the nirguna (without qualities). But — pace Musil? — nothing is without qualities. Nothing stands behind Jar-eel to authenticate her. Nothing. The light and dark of the Moon: being and nothingness.

And that is fine, you think, for the this-world expression of a Chaos deity. But isn’t that how it is for every manifestation of the divine?

The White Moonies are having none of this cant. The saguna obscures the nirguna. The Invisible Moon is coming. Everything must go. You know this might get messy — Godwhacker’s on the case.

[mfbrandi]

3 hours ago, jajagappa said:

Where Uleria brings together and combines and unifies, Kargan Tor separates and divides.

• What is without division: meiosis (reductional division), mitosis (Xerox), and the separation of mother from child? There is more to it than the combination of fertilisation.
• We could keep as separation: Mallia’s “death” rune is not a late acquisition but essential to her being a fertile goddess.
• Celibate and contrarian sects say that Uleria is the herald of the World Gorp: one cell which will incorporate all of creation; one cell with but one thought … or more likely none. On this view, is the separation of truth from falsity, and is the collapse of the ability to make the distinction, the rune being built from and its inversion (i.e. contradiction). They are never invited to weddings. They seldom wash.

[jajagappa]

3 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

What is without division

Therefore you have an argument that Kargan Tor and is in fact the first Power for without that division, there would only be the One  or the Infinite .