Your Dumbest Theory

[Nevermet]

1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

Would that make Nysalor Urizen?

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Not a trap: I have no idea. 😉

Urizen is definitely Solar.  Exactly which, im unsure.

[Nevermet]

2 hours ago, Alex said:

And hermeneutics!  Always quite the power move.  Really the only place to go in the bidspace after that is "Hegelian".

I specialize in educated stupid 🤡

and given my background, I’m more likely to do an actor-network analysis than use Hegel. 

[ViktorD100]

My dumbest theory is easily that the Gbaji wars happened just to mess with the Durulz, who cannot in fact pronounce Gbaji. 

[Malin]

13 hours ago, John Biles said:

I would normally never defend Argath, but while he wanted to destroy the Lunars, if he was a steppe warlord, he would have obliterated Pavis completely and destroyed every city he conquered and handed everyone in Sartar over to his Praxian hordes as slaves and he didn't go that far.

 

Only if they resist and need to be made an example of. If they bend the knee and provide resources like Pavis and the cities of Sartar, they just get incorporated into the expanding empire.

[scott-martin]

1. When Argrath comes back from the LBQ he is also Sheng. Much like the adversaries who end the Dawn Age they are almost never seen together afterward except in the mirror; Greater Sartar is also the Monster Empire.

2. Every culture hides the real primal crime that broke the world behind more socially acceptable screen narratives. For example even the lightbringer cults take credit for solarcide in order to deflect culpability for even more serious crimes, the murders of Malkion and Kendamalar are masks (bolongo is the mask) for the real cosmic problem and so on. Dara Happa can be the worst at this because they insist there is no problem or responsibility at the top, it is the foreigners and other dirty people who are wrong. Only internal scapegoats ("daughters" and other subordinate suns, pony people) are tasked with remembering the truth.

3. All lightbringer cults were chaos cults that recovered, a drag on an old cosmic system. We will not take further questions at this time except to note that Issaries casts no visible shadow and points he takes as his "cut" of collateral worship do not recirculate in quite the same way as the others.

[Alex]

17 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

All lightbringer cults were chaos cults that recovered, a drag on an old cosmic system.

Dara Happenest theory ever, more like!!

[mfbrandi]

  Spin-off comment from the recent Thanatar musings:

5 hours ago, scott-martin said:

[F]or me when a community is producing people who don’t live up to its own standards the ultimate fault is still with the community that writes up the math … People fall through the cracks. You tell them they failed the community but sooner or later … Chaos seeps into the holes they leave behind in the world.

Suppose we had a community where everyone met the standard the community set. We would have our suspicions: either the standards were set so low as to be useless, or the community was a conformist° nightmare with a plentiful supply of Procrustean beds. Probably we could figure out which.

We will all fail some of the tests our societies set for us. If that disturbs us, it is at least better than passing all those tests. Ugh! Only in the no-place are all the tests sweetly reasonable.

We should expect some people to fail to fit the template. We show our compassion and imagination by what we do next. Some of the misfits will be nightmares. Some of them will do new things. Gloranthan — or possibly Gloranthaphile — standard operating procedure may be to assume these are the same misfits and to debate whether to form a lynch mob or create a hero cult.
 

5 hours ago, scott-martin said:

earning parasitic points from a more normative host cult … Malia gets a slice of CA.

Maybe the goddesses that make some go “ick” earn their slice of the mana pie. Let’s ask Arroin:

• Leeches from Swems prevent the loss of those recently reattached extremities.
• Maggots from Gorakiki consume necrotic tissue and disinfect wounds.
• Bacteriophages from Mallia help to keep some of her more boisterous children under control.

 

——————————————————
° I would say “conservative”, but that seems to be loaded with magickal meaning trans-Pond. Best left alone.

[mfbrandi]

• Between the land of the living, where the quester must begin their journey, and the Court of Silence, lies a yawning void where all matters are questionable and nothing maintains a reasonable form. Most of the time it is a dim, cold, empty fog, and from that it gets its name of the Grey Zone … From the Grey Zone it is possible to go deeper (or perhaps it is further) into the realm of gods and mythology and directly experience the eternal God Time. Floating sky islands, bridges to the Spike, wandering planets, and more. Here we can directly experience and interact with the divine powers that drive the cosmos. — Jeff Richard

I could never see the point of the Grey Age, but perhaps this is the answer. It is the temporal equivalent of the spirit plane: the “debatable land” between history and story, between life and the dreams of the dead.

Spoiler

Or “a dimension of perfectly ordinary reality” as Keith Rowe might have it.

It is Tangier and Al Amarja, and the true game of Glorantha is Over the Edge. Tweet and Laws must be so proud.

But the more we lean toward WSB, the more we wonder about the imagery of the Spike.

[scott-martin]

9 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

I could never see the point of the Grey Age, but perhaps this is the answer. It is the temporal equivalent of the spirit plane: the “debatable land” between history and story, between life and the dreams of the dead.

»O, das Meer auch.« Maybe the modern mercenary cult is only a vehicle for fundamental meditation techniques that other priesthoods either keep secret or have lost along the way.

If you would live out here in the wilderness you would know that during the twilight the wind becomes power. A hunter that is worth his salt knows that, and acts accordingly . . . The Nagual said that if the man would've let go of his possessiveness and abandoned himself to his death, whatever it may have been, there wouldn't have been any fear in him.

Or for those with less "appetite for the exotic" ("ethno botany," shades of the interzone), I think of the semantic turmoil of La Nausee or like Bert observes in Chim Chim Cheree:

Up where the smoke
is all billowed and curled
‘Tween pavement and stars is
the chimney sweep’s world
Where there’s hardly no
day nor 'ardly no night
There’s things . . . half in
shadows . . . and halfways in light

 

[mfbrandi]

1 hour ago, scott-martin said:

»O, das Meer auch.« Maybe the modern mercenary cult

Which one? He may bang on about the sea, but can we think of Xenophon as a Humakti? “A good man cannot be harmed” might be a Yelmalian motto, but if so, the cultists forget that they are not their god. YO has looked his death in the face, but he has not — yet? — seen all there is to see; perhaps it is an artifact of his thousand-yard stare. Presumably, Ethilrist gives us a third and himself sits somewhere between Yelmalio and Humakt — at a dinner party they both wish they had managed to avoid — but his cavalry? Not so much. Cannon fodder.

1 hour ago, scott-martin said:

The Nagual said that if the man would’ve let go of his possessiveness and abandoned himself to his death, whatever it may have been, there wouldn’t have been any fear in him.

Taken literally, this might suit the Humakti soldier, but it would be quite amusing if all along Humakt was only the god of ego death — it still fits the blow struck “against” Yelm, but makes all the subsequent bloodshed a rather grim joke (or a very laboured metaphor). It might also make Daka Fal (and all his aliases) more Buddha than Jesus and start to close the snark-gap between the sweat lodgers and the lotus-sitters. 😉

1 hour ago, scott-martin said:

like Bert observes in Chim Chim Cheree:

Up where the smoke
is all billowed and curled
’Tween pavement and stars is
the chimney sweep’s world

Perhaps this is what John Coltrane saw in the tune. And one can dream of an alternate film where Bert was more Brecht than Dick. (All of us born within the sound of Bow Bells bear a particular animus against DVD.) Could Julie Andrews have given us a Gurdjieffian Poppins? Perhaps.

[scott-martin]

5 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

YO

I would stink up their current thread with this and more . . . the fundamental spiritual technology they embody . . . but TLDR their one unique thing (well, maybe shared with illuminated hmkt but maybe not) is that you never see them laugh. As an erudite westerner Ethilrist is familiar with the Laughing Man Stories even if his bronze age milieu prevents him from explicitly recognizing camp. Ooer guv, I believe you people would say.

But "Julie Andrews" is the mantra that unlocks any number of incarnations like hastily constructed wishes, my favourite things. Her fourth way background was on my mind this morning while trying to cough up the Christian/inkling apple lodged in the throat of commercial fantasy, the diasporic dream that drives the comic book superhero cinematic universes, whatever Harry Potter is. Not quite a pagan road but a road that winds between conventional heaven and conventional hell, where Scorsese and Coppola and Alan Moore can cavort.

[mfbrandi]

12 hours ago, scott-martin said:

lodged in the throat of commercial fantasy

So long as we don’t get the comfant — I think it deserves its own bit of Newspeak — lodged in our throats. The Gloranthan Fiction thread baffles me. I wonder what people think they want.

12 hours ago, scott-martin said:

the comic book superhero cinematic universes

The joy of comic books was that blowing up the universe was blissfully silent — barring text-to-audio synaesthesia — while cinemas have gotten far too loud for me … even when showing things that don’t explode. How do people stand it?

[mfbrandi]

13 hours ago, scott-martin said:

As an erudite westerner Ethilrist is familiar with the Laughing Man Stories even if his bronze age milieu prevents him from explicitly recognizing camp.

Wikipedia has this nice little snippet:

• High Camp always has an underlying seriousness. You can’t camp about something you don’t take seriously. You’re not making fun of it, you’re making fun out of it. You’re expressing what’s basically serious to you in terms of fun and artifice and elegance. Baroque art is basically camp about religion.
  — Christopher Isherwood, The World in the Evening

Glorantha, then, would seem to be inescapably camp, and RQG in its “embrace of artifice, frivolity, naivety, pretentiousness, offensiveness, and excess” the paradigm of the baroque RPG.

Edited November 22 by mfbrandi

[Joerg]

17 hours ago, scott-martin said:

But "Julie Andrews" is the mantra that unlocks any number of incarnations like hastily constructed wishes, my favourite things.

E.g. the one in Blake Edward's SOB?

[mfbrandi]

• For Isis is a Greek word, and so also is Typhon, her enemy, who is conceited, as his name implies, because of his ignorance and self-deception. He tears to pieces and scatters to the winds the sacred writings, which the goddess collects and puts together
  — Plutarch, Isis and Osiris

Isis = Moon. Typhon = Set = Storm, and according to Plutarch “puffed up”.

I imagine Orlanth hearing the sacred writings read, thinking of his own dismal poetry — which, thankfully, he cannot write down — and ripping the scrolls from the reader’s hands in fury. I toyed briefly with Big O = Delmore Schwartz.

[scott-martin]

16 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

Big O = Delmore Schwartz

Oh he gets a few bangers.



--

The sky is fixed. It is the earth that moves. The moon currently partakes in both realms, rolling in place. 

Change is how you know time is alive.

[mfbrandi]

2 hours ago, scott-martin said:

I had to look it up, but in doing so found this:

• Morrison describes the Question as “a little bit like Rorschach but absolutely nothing like Rorschach.”

How is that for insanely circular? I did feel sorry for poor old Ditko getting sucked into the lunacy of “objectivism”. Did you ever try to read his more ranty political comics? I confess to laughing at Killjoy way back when — as the B feature in E-Man IIRC. And Nova Kane — “Basic black. Either a cocktail party or an execution.” — and her pal investigating a plague gets us back to ancient Egypt. 😉

[scott-martin]

2 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

How is that for insanely circular?

The project is very much like watching an AI find its way out of a maze before the fuel gauge reads empty. Recommended but maybe not ultimately a rewarding experience as the little bot tries every route against the ticking clock.

Nova Kane is the red goddess, speaking of the circular orbit of the mind.

[scott-martin]

"Bormandy" is of course a corruption of Boris Mundi, the gnostic world of the borists and arguably that heresy's historical place of origin. However nobody polite wants to talk about this so they call that land something else today . . . this is an opportunity for modern borists who congregate in more or less ad hoc "bormandies" convened for cultic rites without too much fear of being spotted.

Any relationship to "Bortugal," "Borittany," "Borway," "Boriggadoon" and the endless other so-called Ephemeral States Of The Ban (aka "States Of Mind") requires a hall pass before the thesis committee can review. Suffice to say they show up on some maps. People saw them there. But now they are gone.

Edited Friday at 11:25 PM by scott-martin
hide in plain sight

[mfbrandi]

28 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

Boriggadoon

Which gives us hope that the Syndics Ban will descend again very soon.

Camelot and Brigadoon both have words an music by Lerner and Loewe. What does this tell us about the Chaosium soundtrack? With a smile on my face for the whole human race, it's almost like being insane.

[mfbrandi]

Shamans Against Orlanth

Having recently speculated on Aether as bright air and Umath and company as dark air, I stumble across this:

• Shipibo-Konibo healers see the body as covered in kené, the patterns of which are used to visualise the ‘air’ or aura surrounding a person. Bad or dark air can be sucked out with the aid of tobacco smoke. Tobacco and ayahuasca help the shaman to produce flema, a ‘phlegm’ they can project into the patient’s body, which contains virotes, darts deployed to attack the source of the dark air: these may be invisible, or may take the material form of tree spines, porcupine quills or stinging caterpillars.
  — Mike Jay, At the Sainsbury Centre: Ayahuasca Art

Jay is writing about a couple of exhibitions at the Sainsbury Centre (UEA), and those for whom Norwich is not too far might want to drop in. A Gysin–Sommerville Dreamachine is promised. The more paranoid might see the hand of a Gloranthaphile in the exhibitions’ logo, which wilfully incorporates and runes.

Spoiler

Edited Saturday at 11:51 AM by mfbrandi

[Joerg]

Having just seen a discussion of Hathor's head gear as a horned rising sun, I wonder whether the Chaos Rune might have solar connotations rather than/in addition to Darkness.

[mfbrandi]

22 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Isis = Moon. Typhon = Set = Storm, and according to Plutarch “puffed up”.

But I spoke too soon: familiar as these identifications may seem, Plutarch presents other ideas:

• There is another tale current among the Egyptians, that Apopis, brother of the Sun, made war upon Zeus, and that because Osiris espoused Zeus’s cause … Zeus adopted Osiris as his son and gave him the name of Dionysus … [T]he Egyptians apply the name “Zeus” to the wind, and whatever is dry or fiery is antagonistic to this … moisture, by doing away with the excess of dryness, increases and strengthens the exhalations by which the wind is fostered and made vigorous.
  — Plutarch, Isis and Osiris (trans. Frank Cole Babbitt, Loeb: Moralia V, pp. 89–91)
   
• But the Egyptians, by combining with these physical explanations some of the scientific results derived from astronomy, think that by Typhon is meant the solar world, and by Osiris the lunar world; they reason that the moon, because it has a light that is generative and productive of moisture, is kindly towards the young of animals and the burgeoning plants, whereas the sun, by its untempered and pitiless heat, makes all growing and flourishing vegetation hot and parched, and, through its blazing light, renders a large part of the earth uninhabitable, and in many a region overpowers the moon.
  — Plutarch, Isis and Osiris (ibid., p. 101)

In this model, Isis is the earth moistened by Osiris. So now we have the powers of moisture (, ) allied against , brother of . That should ring some bells, and maybe it will suit Jörg’s analysis of the Chaos glyph.

Plutarch also presents the model of as parent to , , and in the context of “the festival of the Pamylia [in which is carried] a statue of which the male member is triple” (ibid., p. 89). This suggests both the trident as a water symbol and a derivation of the despised — by me, at least — .

Perhaps the lesson is this: we quibble foolishly about which elements are most important for agriculture, but each of us is certain that our deity is the truest friend of the crops.

Remember, this is a dumb “theory” — a game. Do not mistake it for knowledge.

[ViktorD100]

Okay, I have a much dumber theory than my last one now.

At the end of the Hero Wars, when the end of RuneQuest is upon us, the world of Glorantha will be plunged into a chaotic mess, but through the apotheosis of Argrath will re-emerge as a new world, that being our Earth. And that will segue us from the Chaosium RuneQuest line to the Avalon Hill products of old. Reprints will be inbound.

[mfbrandi]

• His father laughed. It was the kind of laughter one sometimes heard from a masked ancestral spirit. He would salute you by name and ask you if you knew who he was. You would reply with one hand humbly touching the ground that you did not, that he was beyond human knowledge. Then he might laugh as if through a throat of metal. And the meaning of that laughter was clear: ‘I did not really think you would know, you miserable human worm!’ Obi’s father’s laughter vanished as it had come — without warning, leaving no footprints.
  — Chinua Achebe, No Longer at Ease (ch. 14)