Your Dumbest Theory

[mfbrandi]

5 hours ago, scott-martin said:

Of course there are those who argue that the collapse is cyclical and every dying civilization goes through similar crises: 300 ST, 900 ST, now.

But we are always two or three civilizational collapses away from the beginning of time. At least, I seem to remember saying that nine or ten civilizational collapses ago. We Young Glorantha Creationists wave our banner with gusto and irony.

[mfbrandi]

• When in the 17th and 18th centuries Confucius first attracted attention in the West … [i]t took some time to appreciate that, except for the Mohists, no one in ancient China much cared whether consciousness survives death or whether Heaven is a personal God or impersonal principle, issues of overwhelming importance to Jesuits and philosophes. The attitude of Confucius is that we should not be diverted from human affairs by matters which do not concern us. There is no reason to question that he recognises the sacrifices to Heaven, [and others], as the greatest of ceremonies, harmonising not only man with man but man with cosmos. But for him the value of the ceremony is in the harmony itself and does not depend on anything outside.
  — A C Graham, Disputers of the Tao (p. 15)

Now consider how we view build Gloranthan religion — very Western, very Xtian, very … Modern. No amount of technicolour polytheism will get us off the hook.

[scott-martin]

"Prax" . . . with all its big and little altars everywhere, pockmarked by cosmic history . . . is only secondarily an ecological zone with significantly better weather than the true wastes.

It's really a state of mind where you're at home in the landscape and that feeling renders every hill and bush somehow sacred. You can be anywhere and be in "Prax." The shamans just have better records for the part west of the river.

[jajagappa]

52 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

You can be anywhere and be in "Prax."

As long as you avoid the Zax.

[mfbrandi]

11 hours ago, scott-martin said:

It’s really a state of mind where you’re at home in the landscape

And that is what makes it scary. The only fair lottery is the one where the humans always win. I had to bury the goddess in order to save her. The butcher shows concern for the butchered.

They need to invent an unheimlich manoeuvre. BB assures me a little alienation is good for me. (And don’t worry: here in the interzone, we have plenty.)

[Ynneadwraith]

12 hours ago, scott-martin said:

"Prax" . . . with all its big and little altars everywhere, pockmarked by cosmic history . . . is only secondarily an ecological zone with significantly better weather than the true wastes.

It's really a state of mind where you're at home in the landscape and that feeling renders every hill and bush somehow sacred. You can be anywhere and be in "Prax." The shamans just have better records for the part west of the river.

This I like from a 'everyone used to be Hsunchen before all these Great Spirits started having ideas above their station' perspective.

Perhaps the beliefs in Prax are an echo of this thinking, reverberating through the generations where everyone else has forgotten.

[mfbrandi]

48 minutes ago, Ynneadwraith said:

More of an issue is the mounting colossal pile of iron armour buried within Dorastor. Like an anti-magic Great Pacific Garbage Patch. What happens when that much anti-magic in one place gets heavy enough to punch through the magical firmament of Glorantha?

Perhaps the Great Dorastor Armour Patch is Ralzakark’s “stamp collection” and/or he is the Third Age’s true Age-ending hero — just waiting for the critical mass that will enable a world-encompassing anti-magic wave when it is sprinkled with powdered unicorn horn (to remove all the carbon from the steel).

Dorastor is Glorantha’s Zone: what happens when the great wave hits all that buried Feldichi tech?

Edited April 16 by mfbrandi
added link to eff’s post

[Ynneadwraith]

6 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

Perhaps the Great Dorastor Armour Patch is Ralzakark’s “stamp collection”

"See this one is especially interesting because the smith has made a print error when applying the Death rune. See, just below the teeth marks. That's very rare as they're normally extremely diligent with such an important rune. I've been offered an entire collection of miscast Hyaloring helmets by a Lunar collector in Saird, but I just won't part with it."

[mfbrandi]

5 hours ago, Joerg said:

the identification of the Evil Emperor as Malkion in Dawn Age western Genertela

If Malkion is air + water (storm), wouldn’t this just underline the Oedipal — or yet more intimate — nature of Orlanth’s rebellion? And isn’t there an Orlanthi motif of dragonslaying as utuma? And so we trudge on — through debatable (or at least dubious) lands — pushing toward Orlanth’s slaying himself to create the temporal world. And if we equivocate on father/self/son, we get something like God’s sacrificing his son to “save” the world.

If Orlanth is always striving to be Top God, we expect IG–Blowhard mash-ups to emerge now and again. (I am sure there is a term for them.) Is Daka Fal a “holy ghost” aspect? Not being an insider, I never knew the function of the HG. At least we don’t have to have two ur-murders — god and man, the sun and the son — and can consolidate them into one easy-to-manage sacrifice.

On the assumption that on the Web one can find a random eccentric peddling anything, I searched and I found:

• THE MORNING STAR: It is only three times that we find this appellation given to our Lord in scripture — once in 2 Peter 1, once in Revelation 2, and again in Revelation 22. In Peter it is rendered in our translation “day star”; and indeed the word is not the same as that found in Revelation. But the word used by Peter is the proper name of the morning star, and means the “light-bringer”, while that used by John, equally applying to the morning star, indicates rather the time of its appearance in the early morning.
  — Edward Dennett, Christ as the Morning Star and the Sun of Righteousness

So we can weave in the solar stuff, too, and of course:

• Morning Star -> Lucifer -> Devil
• Morning Star -> Venus -> Aphrodite (risen from the foam or not)
• Phosphorus = Hesperus (famously standing for all dualities which are really identities)

So we can have our cake and eat it — a must with gods who want to swallow all the others.

—————————————————————————————————
In retrospect, a pole vault over my usual comfortable swamp of Dumber and into the twittering abyss of Dumbest. Never mind. Let it stand.

Edited April 17 by mfbrandi
footnote

[Joerg]

1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

If Malkion is air + water (storm), wouldn’t this just underline the Oedipal — or yet more intimate — nature of Orlanth’s rebellion?

If Malkion had slain Orlanth (Aerlit), oedipal. With the generational sequence inverted, Orlanth is slaying a wayward (and disinherited) son (or nephew, or cousin), as he did with Thryk. At worst, Orlanth is performing a partial suicide (something repeated with Dragonbreaker ending Dragonfriend), purging himself of Imperial Storm, but that would be quite far-fetched.

 

 

1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

And isn’t there an Orlanthi motif of dragonslaying as utuma? And so we trudge on — through debatable (or at least dubious) lands — pushing toward Orlanth’s slaying himself to create the temporal world. And if we equivocate on father/self/son, we get something like God’s sacrificing his son to “save” the world.

Not even anything like hanging himself in the boughs of Yggdrasil to attain transcendent wisdom. This is more of an early refutation of an aspect of self on his way to ... redemption rather than transcendence. Not just for himself, but for his (inherited) element.

1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

If Orlanth is always striving to be Top God, we expect IG–Blowhard mash-ups to emerge now and again.

Orlanth was on his ascendance to significance by challenging the Emperor and re-instating the Earth Queen. The myth of the Initiation of Orlanth sounds a bit off to me - sure, his brothers may have been ready for their trials, but Orlanth was just one of a number of local mountain winds when Umath was dismembered by Jagrekriand. Aerlit was more prominent in the Vadrudi host than the godling from Kero Fin, and he was a side character. But then so were the Storm ancestors of the Triolini, compared to the track of disruption and destruction left behind by Vadrus.

Orlanth slowly worked his way up, imitating his elder siblings (like repeating Vadrus' Nestentos feat against Aroka) and using ungodly trickery against his more powerful beastly brother. Rattle and war-dance vs. courtly procession may have been an unthinking, childish attempt, but for the contest of music Orlanth comes with subtlety unbecoming of a child of Umath. Almost as if he was a mortal on his way into the top of his pantheon.

[Akhôrahil]

On 4/15/2024 at 11:53 PM, scott-martin said:

It's really a state of mind where you're at home in the landscape and that feeling renders every hill and bush somehow sacred. You can be anywhere and be in "Prax." The shamans just have better records for the part west of the river.

Prax is where your heart is?

[mfbrandi]

GLORANTHAN KARAOKE

They say Danaë is in tonight, but I don’t think this one is directed at her:

• Some people say my words cannot be true
  Have faith in me, my child, and I’ll show you
  I will give you those things you thought unreal
  The sun, the moon, Arkat all bear my seal

  Follow me now and you will not regret
  Leaving the life you led before we met
  You must surrender to this light of mine
  Forever shining till the end of time

  Your trust in me has just got to be real
  Before you’ll know the way you’re going to feel

  Now that you’re bathing in my golden shower
  Our light grows stronger now with every hour
  Look into my eyes, you’ll see who I am
  My name is Nysalor, please take my hand

If Uncle ZeeZee’s here, there could be fight … or is that him singing? Gosh!

[mfbrandi]

  Spun off from Gods and Death.

9 hours ago, jajagappa said:

Actually I remember there is at least one other, and he is the one who steps outside the Dome and at some point rescues Lightfore: Dayzatar.  So, let there be LIGHT! And the world reborn.

Hmm … outside the Dome.

On the “standard model”, Arachne Solara recreates the world using Chaos (pick your Devil), thus recapitulating the “original” creation of the world from Chaos (the Void). And the symbol of this is the sun rising — fiat lux. And “Arachne Solara” connotes both light and — in Glorantha-code — darkness, with darkness preceding light. Every beginning is the beginning.

So the Dayzatar version is maybe just a switch of agent for (re-)creation conceived in the same way. “Going outside” is just another way of saying that the Void/Chaos is the source of the new world, as it always is and must be. Free jazz, baby!

Clearly, the creation has no agent, so sub in anyone you like. But Yelmalio says, “Wasn’t me, governor.”

[scott-martin]

Elves and trolls, seelie and unseelie, guelph and goblin, were part of a single balanced symbolic ecosystem before Nysalarkat pulled them apart from opposite directions. This is tied up in the way Arkat receives and repudiates "aldryami" illumination while Nysalor receives and rejects "digijelm" guardianship. One flees the light and seeks the dark. One flees the dark and stretches toward the light. A full year in the vegetable country.

This is the game that would have been Shadows Dance but at this point only the mushroom people remember how that was supposed to work.

Dwarves remain their own thing. 

[mfbrandi]

40 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

“digijelm”

Digits + (Y|J)elm. Now, there is a portmanteau for you.

The children of the Dark are the fingers of the Sun. Of course they are.

Edited Friday at 03:28 PM by mfbrandi

[mfbrandi]

 

 

With a tip of the hat to Eff for making me think of Fred Dretske.

[mfbrandi]

Do cultists seek to do the will of their god? The Crimson Bat cult exists to have the BatGodDemon do the will of the cult. Is it anomalous or just more honest than other cults?

If I seek by magico-religious means to take control of a god, do I thereby partake of its runes? If harmony seeks to control disorder, does it thereby partake of disorder?

[mfbrandi]

When one recapitulates one’s god’s deeds in heroquest, those deeds are ones she performed before her own apotheosis.

This is one way to grapple with “when was the time of myth” — it could be anytime, but the events have been “promoted sideways” into the realm of story.

(Would this break canon? Which thread are we in, again?)

[Eff]

2 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Do cultists seek to do the will of their god? The Crimson Bat cult exists to have the BatGodDemon do the will of the cult. Is it anomalous or just more honest than other cults?

If I seek by magico-religious means to take control of a god, do I thereby partake of its runes? If harmony seeks to control disorder, does it thereby partake of disorder?

I think this theory relies on several even dumber theories, such as "Gods in Glorantha have will", "mortals in Glorantha have will", and "harmony exists in Glorantha." We can't even get melodies there, for Pete's sake!

So let me trump them all with my own dumb theory: the Hero Wars could be averted by providing nu-Arachne Solara with a copy of Progress Quest.

[Tatterdemalion Fox]

When you call upon the magic of the Other Side, out beyond the confines of the Net, there is a moment when the worlds touch. (Not three worlds, before you cut me down where I stand; two is enough here.) There is a moment of bleed, where the sacred and the profane meet, and for a moment the Other Side is made recognizable through the world, and the Godtime is made manifest for that same moment inside of the Net.

Sometimes this is visual (as we have seen in many pieces of art), but just as often it is olfactory (the sense most deeply tied to memory), and perhaps even more often it is auditory. As we know through the story of Yelm's Challenges, and our own experiences of contacting the gods, the world before the world was one where communication and music and dance were three strings of the same harp, a world where the gods would break out into poetry and song as an expression of their vital essences. This is why we use these methods to touch the Other Side ourselves.

Those who have impressed themselves upon the Godtime and touched Infinity find that this bleed does not leave them; it ebbs and flows, but never entirely recedes. They are a nexus point where the world of the gods meets the world of men again, and signs and omens are endemic to their very nature; when they reveal their full glory, the world is painted in strange colors and haunted by strange songs.

Which is so much to say that it is very easy to tell exactly when you are about to be killed by Jar-Eel the Razoress.

[John Biles]

9 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Do cultists seek to do the will of their god? The Crimson Bat cult exists to have the BatGodDemon do the will of the cult. Is it anomalous or just more honest than other cults?

If I seek by magico-religious means to take control of a god, do I thereby partake of its runes? If harmony seeks to control disorder, does it thereby partake of disorder?

Cults in Glorantha pretty clearly operate on the model of 'You do X for the God, he does Y for you', except for those stuck n 'You do X for the God so he doesn't do Z to you, where Z  is suffering and pain.'  When you heroquest, the model is 'good cosplay is rewarded with magic'. 

Sorcerors, who use the runes as toys, operate on the 'If I do X, the runes automatically have to respond with Y'.

I would say that in Heroquesting, if you're portraying someone with different runes, you need to ACT like you're partaking of them.

But also if someone casts a runespell on you for a rune you don't have.

 

[Ynneadwraith]

On 4/28/2024 at 6:18 AM, John Biles said:

Cults in Glorantha pretty clearly operate on the model of 'You do X for the God, he does Y for you'.

Sorcerors, who use the runes as toys, operate on the 'If I do X, the runes automatically have to respond with Y'.

If it's all the same system, then sorcery makes the god produce magic involuntarily. Like whipping your hand back if someone pokes you with a cocktail stick. No wonder they don't like it! It's just plain rude...

[Nick Brooke]

In my demonology-inspired model, God Learners learned summoning circles, secret names and words of power that could compel pagan gods to work for them (e.g. by providing Rune spells), however unwillingly.

"If I do X, I can make this demon do Y."

[Ynneadwraith]

54 minutes ago, Nick Brooke said:

In my demonology-inspired model, God Learners learned summoning circles, secret names and words of power that could compel pagan gods to work for them (e.g. by providing Rune spells), however unwillingly.

"If I do X, I can make this demon do Y."

Ooh I like the idea that the secrets the God Learners discovered in their deep heroquesting was the True Names of the gods/runes.

I've got a bit of a vision of what paleolithic/neolithic Glorantha looked like that this fits nicely into (and would also fit well in this thread!). None of it is particularly new mind...

The idea being that the Gloranthan paleolithic was populated by various different Hsunchen-like animal totem people in a sort of wild magic/spiritual environment, before a lot of the theistic mythic structures formed. Sartarites, for instance, may well be descendants of Alynx-totem people. There's some sort of Bull-complex between Prax and the Carmanian Bull-Shahs as well.

The myths and stories of Godtime are all post-hoc rationalisations of real-world events (back when the real world and the spirit world weren't really separated). These events have been wallpapered over by thousands of years of mythic reinterpretation until we get the gods that we know in Glorantha today.

So, the 'True Name' of gloranthan gods is less some incomprehensible daemonic jumble of letters, and more akin to knowing that the Night King was just a man who wants to go home. Deep within Orlanth lies a kernel of the first prehistoric man to create a bullroarer and call the storm, upon which all the later mythic architecture is hung.

This is one of the Truths that the God Learners discovered. By calling out the childhood name of that long lost soul, they could speak to the very core of a God/Rune and convince it to do things that all the rest of the constructed personality would never even entertain.

Perhaps that's why the Lunar Gods are that much more present. Nothing to do with being in or outside of the net of time (as anything more than an allegory), but simply because the Lunars knew who they were, and their gods still remember that too.

End dumbest theory 😄

Edited yesterday at 11:05 AM by Ynneadwraith