Your Dumbest Theory

[mfbrandi]

  Perspectives on Illumination

8 hours ago, davecake said:

Illumination is Illumination, and all paths are different routes to the same place — if Illumination is about the unity of everything and knowledge of the deep truth underlying the world, well it’s got to be the same.

• Pigheaded Orthodoxy
  There are deep truths underlying the world which contradict one another.
  Who is to say that only one of them can claim the title of the secret of illumination?
   
• Aunty Ludwig’s Illumination
  Illumination leaves the world as it found it.
  The mystic is not digging for the truth — the underlying facts.
  It doesn’t matter how the dice fell.

If the mystic is mistaken for one chasing the right facts — the right incontestable deep description of the world — to unlock [power|revolution|new consciousness|whatever], she will be thought to be cavalier with the facts, to disrespect the truth. But the mystic isn’t setting out to discover what the world is like, she is cultivating a new attitude to the world. Mysticism isn’t physics, and it isn’t metaphysics either. (Neither archaeology, nor palaeontology.)

There is no secret of illumination (knowledge that) for anyone to teach, but there are techniques (knowledge how) which may aid some on the path and which can be taught. But that has been staring us in the face all along, hasn’t it?

Who would expect a Chaos god’s “secret” to be a fact, some datum of surpassing importance?

• Mistress, what is it I seek to grasp?
• Nothing, daughter. Nothing.

Edited December 5, 2024 by mfbrandi
missing question mark

[Eff]

If indeed mysticism is simply a form of perennial wisdom, then the mystics would fear Chaos/entropy all the more than anyone else, for the power of change would be the antithesis to their eternal stare into the eyes of the gorgon. But that this is not the case suggests something different about the mystics.

[jajagappa]

On 12/5/2024 at 8:38 AM, mfbrandi said:

• Mistress, what is it I seek to grasp?
• Nothing, daughter. Nothing.

The Climb Riddle? 🙂

[scott-martin]

As I perform one of the biggest cliches of all and "return to" my personal "rainbow mounds" of mysticism (talk about Climb checks!) I think all of these optics are correct. The challenge is the lensing effect generated at the interface between the eternal, necessary and uncreated viewpoint (a direct interface with "chaos" or the wellspring of being, everything can be true so nothing is necessarily forbidden) and the contingent and ephemeral identity structure that anchors that viewpoint until getting reshuffled back into the pleroma.

Talking about mystics reinforces the distinctions between schools, flavors, specific riddles because that's the surface we engage with there. Talking from mysticism is a different kind of conversation and is often boring or repetitive because that's the totality of the experience talking. Each has its pleasure but one is bigger than it looks on the outside.

What this means is that on the inside, the revelations converge on that unified viewpoint and moral "chaos" does not exist. Coming out from the inside, revelation gets caught in the web again, restricting freedom of motion and potentially regenerating some form of anxiety. Looking in from the "outside" that is only a separate inside, the lensing effect almost guarantees that what we see will be smaller and sometimes inverted. This is where the fun of an illuminated game emerges like when one juggler meets another and their relatively simple cascades incorporate passes (Why the Puppeteers Love Dragon "Pass") and other more complicated patterns. The game gets as sophisticated as the players can stand.
 

On 12/5/2024 at 8:38 AM, mfbrandi said:

Who would expect a Chaos god’s “secret” to be a fact

Looking at the various cult write ups I suspect "secret" is generally used here in the sense of some crime against cosmos, a deed or desire that normative cults suppress through shame and other mechanisms. A secret crime, a "sin." These are things that are latent in the world but can only be expressed in the silence of the bardo. The world conspires to keep them "secret." Each chaos cult is thus its own secret. When it emerges, there's generally a problem that the world needs to address. 

One could argue that normative cults operate in a vaguely similar way in that their secret "powers" are suppressed in the web of being unless an initiate focuses so strongly on that particular aspect of life that the mystery is resolved and that particular "solution" is revealed. This may be how skill-based riddles work in their multiplicity. 

The distinction, of course, is that normative cults deliver their secrets via increasingly miraculous rune spells whereas the classic Nysalor experience is all about secular expertise if not mastery. The more closely you pursue some aspect of experience, the more skill checks you make, the better equipped you are to solve that particular riddle and recollect that particular "secret," the answer.

It's possible that each of the chaos cults embodies a similar technology of consciousness, albeit usually stunted and vestigial. Who cares enough to find out? On the other hand, Nysalor may be special, an optical trick of his own. 

[jajagappa]

2 hours ago, scott-martin said:

This is where the fun of an illuminated game emerges like when one juggler meets another and their relatively simple cascades incorporate passes (Why the Puppeteers Love Dragon "Pass")

Reminds me of my old 90s campaign during character generation where one of my players couldn't think of a character name and simply said "I Pass", thus resulting by GM fiat in the character Ipas.

2 hours ago, scott-martin said:

Talking about mystics reinforces the distinctions between schools, flavors, specific riddles because that's the surface we engage with there. Talking from mysticism is a different kind of conversation and is often boring or repetitive because that's the totality of the experience talking. Each has its pleasure but one is bigger than it looks on the outside.

As some of the mystics might tell you, you must let go of schools, flavors, and even talking - it can only be experienced, never explained. The dragons, of course, don't mind experiencing the void and Chaos as it simply returns to Ouroboros whether the Silence of Ending or the "O"! of Return.

[mfbrandi]

On 12/6/2024 at 5:01 PM, scott-martin said:

What this means is that on the inside, the revelations converge on that unified viewpoint and moral “chaos” does not exist. Coming out from the inside, revelation gets caught in the web again, restricting freedom of motion and potentially regenerating some form of anxiety.

It is the tripper’s conviction that their insight when peaking is slipping away from them as they come down. Or the dream that the dreamer on waking cannot quite pin down. The conviction and the anxiety are real enough. What is unclear — what remains unproven — is that there ever was any escaped insight or dream content. And that is what we expect: if we could go back and check, the anxiety could be allayed. But there is no method of checking — how would one even evaluate proposed methods? (We could offer propositions till the tripper or dreamer said “yes, that!” — but then we would just have reinvented a fragment of psychoanalysis. “Pseudoscience” might be a harsh label, but …)

Sometimes the returner to normal consciousness will think that in their altered state “everything made sense.” Add their feeling that something has slipped through their fingers, and they may think that if only they “again” had access to that bit of information, they could again be at peace with the world. Perhaps they need to accept that no secret knowledge will enable them to make peace with the world — that adjustment is not a matter of learning one’s lines: it is not a matter of reasoning or belief. It might still be slippery as an eel, however!

On 12/6/2024 at 5:01 PM, scott-martin said:

This is where the fun of an illuminated game emerges like when one juggler meets another and their relatively simple cascades incorporate passes (Why the Puppeteers Love Dragon “Pass”) and other more complicated patterns.

As the wisdom of the neo-hippies, crusties, and circus freaks had it in the early ’90s, “acid is the perfect drug for jugglers, as it makes the balls move much more slowly.” All … the … tiiiiiiiiiime … in … the … woooooooooorld.

[mfbrandi]

On 12/6/2024 at 7:50 PM, jajagappa said:

you must let go of schools, flavours, and even talking — it can only be experienced, never explained.

And we are back in the general vicinity of the end of Aunty Ludwig’s published book. My guess is that LW (early and late) would caution against the idea that that which “we must pass over in silence” is just more of the same: just like propositional knowledge but somehow unsayable. According to him, it is not that there is some picture of reality which — mysteriously — we cannot draw. (There may be things we will never know, but simple ignorance does not tease us.)

Unaussprechlichen Kulten. Perhaps not unspeakable cults and not ineffable cults either — nor even, as I used to imagine the joke was, unpronounceable cults — but cults of the ineffable. A “fetish” of trying to make a something of a nothing.

[Eff]

What was it?

Surrounding laughter, and close regard. Knowledge of intent. 

What is it? 

That which the electron feels when it does the orbital shuffle. 

What will it? 

It will, unless it won't. Try not to choke. 

Where was the sun?

Over the oak.

Where was the shadow? 

Under the elm.

How was it stepped? 

You know the rest.

[scott-martin]

I feel like I'm repeating and this set is reaching its limit . . . the crew needs time to pack up and get on the road to the next show, everyone else needs to find their cars and head home. But maybe a few old standards for the encore, a suite:

1. The theyalans were never either celts nor teutons nor even macedonians . . .  but rockers. Greasers. Stay golden, Pony Boy. The lunars, on the other hand? Punk rock apocalypse. Live fast, die young. 

I think this makes the dara happans operatic proggies, kids with art school backgrounds and art school taste. The west can be a li'l bit country, where Jerry Lee Lewis goes to die, wherever Olivia Newton John comes from.

2. Of course "chaos" in the sense mystics, mythonauts and semioticians use the term is the wellspring of life and the answer to death. Of course. But these people are infamous for using metaphors to describe interactions of the soul. When these interactions are literalized ("de la réification") the results are almost never anything like satisfying . . . every container you find is too small and overflows, too thin and shatters, too thick, too something. This is the origin of chaos cults.

3. That said, ask in the right way and you will get satisfaction . . . if not what you want then you get what you need. Miracles happens.

[mfbrandi]

15 hours ago, scott-martin said:

• theyalans … rockers
• lunars … Punk rock apocalypse
• dara happans operatic proggies
• the west … a li’l bit country

Hmm … maybe. Primitive, violent, not as radical as it thinks it is (but the management may talk a good game) — maybe this could apply as much to Orlanth the young rebel (Adventurous) as to Sedenya the changer. Young O = Sid V. The proto-RG = Johnny L? But who is Malcolm M? The Ernalda–Gorgorma–Dendara trickster goddess, perhaps. Nysalor = Jah Wobble: chain-wielding thug and mystical seeker?

An older-but-no-wiser O Rex may “revert” to the 1950s’ rocker he never was. Nostalgia always has to reach back a little too far. But he is no Little Richard and hasn’t the wit to be Chuck Berry. Ike Turner? And there is always his namesake … but maybe someone had that “king” in mind.

Spoiler

“All-white black boy / Loved his mom / Packed a rod / Popped Valium.” — ICU, Bones of Elvis

It is a cheap joke, but I cannot resist the idea of Old and in the Way as Zzabur’s house band. The blue collar strata of Malkioni society have to “make do” with Merle Haggard and Los Lobos.

Spoiler

Western misfits veer toward the Cali folk of certified demigoddess Kate Wolf, one likes to think.

Dara Happa has Magma on retainer?

15 hours ago, scott-martin said:

Of course “chaos” … mystics, mythonauts and semioticians … are infamous for using metaphors

Surely deep, reflective Chaos embraces free improvisation — the attempt to create music from nothing — possibly of the laminal kind, with any pair of improvisations as un/alike as a pair of trees. “A five-year-old could do what we do on stage … but of course, no five-year-old could.” “I last tuned my guitar in 1965.” “Those moments when you stop playing to listen to that interesting sound and discover that you were making it yourself.”° Think “Like a Cloud Hanging in the Sky?” and The Nameless Uncarved Block.

Krarsht will always buck the trend: she loves the music of Webern and her guilty pleasure is Morton Subotnick. Sit a krarshtkid down in front of a pipe organ and in a blur of legs and tongues it will begin to improvise like Olivier Messiaen.

The music of Vivamort sounds like this. Of course it does.

I do so love this nonsense! 😉

————————————————
° None of those “quotes” is verbatim. I am relying on folklore and my memories of things Keith Rowe and Eddie Prévost said in The Wire.

Edited December 10, 2024 by mfbrandi

[scott-martin]

17 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

not as radical as it thinks it is

Yeah, too late I figured out the praxites are the rastas.

I like the more rigorous kaos kults as various spectralists, serialists and beyond. As the old guy sitting next to me in the little room at Carnegie Hall leaned over to mutter to his old wife, "well, it was better than the Webern."
 

20 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

Dara Happa has Magma on retainer?

(Hippies ∩ money) ∪ (progs ∩ frogs), so to speak.

[mfbrandi]

5 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

Yeah, too late I figured out the praxites are the rastas

… but it turned out the “hazia” was just some ground-up beta blockers found down the back of the sofa.

[mfbrandi]

9 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

As the old guy sitting next to me in the little room at Carnegie Hall leaned over to mutter to his old wife, “Well, it was better than the Webern.”

This is the Secret Origin™ of Krarsht as a cult of assassins. Our Toothy Mother won’t have a word said against dear old Anton.

She has a little list. They’ll none of them be missed.

[John Biles]

20 hours ago, scott-martin said:

I feel like I'm repeating and this set is reaching its limit . . . the crew needs time to pack up and get on the road to the next show, everyone else needs to find their cars and head home. But maybe a few old standards for the encore, a suite:

1. The theyalans were never either celts nor teutons nor even macedonians . . .  but rockers. Greasers. Stay golden, Pony Boy. The lunars, on the other hand? Punk rock apocalypse. Live fast, die young. 

I think this makes the dara happans operatic proggies, kids with art school backgrounds and art school taste. The west can be a li'l bit country, where Jerry Lee Lewis goes to die, wherever Olivia Newton John comes from.

 

The West is *classical music* with Music Theory as the God Learner's secret.

Diatonic music is the music of illumimates.

Pameltela is county music land.

 

Edit:

The Rokari are 7 note purists who regard sharps and flats as God-Learner inventions.

The Ship of Life, unlike most Westerners, only do sea shanties.  Weirdly, the Wolf Pirates are the same at sea; on land, only bagpipes will do.

The Loksalmi are all rococo, all the time.

The Kingdom of War is, of course, Death Metal.

Each Arkat throws genres into a blender and produces things that work but should not.

 

 

Edited December 11, 2024 by John Biles

[mfbrandi]

19 hours ago, John Biles said:

Diatonic music is the music of illuminates.

Hmm … I’d have thought they’d have gone for modes of limited transposition. Why? Because when one transposes from Chaos to Order, one gets the same pitch classes. (Or so they tell me.) Also, the notes should be evenly spaced — as in a whole-tone or chromatic scale (in 12 TET) — because, you know, no direction home.

Edited December 11, 2024 by mfbrandi

[mfbrandi]

Jeff sez Chaos is evil, so Chaos publishes a recruiting poster … of sorts. (This is Chaos. Adjust expectations accordingly.°)

• They say you shouldn’t eat your mother.°°
   
• Argument only takes us from what we agree on to what we should agree on if we are to cling to our shared starting point, but you and your fellows agree on nothing, so arguments are futile, aren’t they?
   
• You dig and dig and dig — looking for something, anything, to support the things you cannot believe — but your spade never strikes the bedrock of certainty. No excavated proposition seems even slightly plausible.
   
• 🎶 You can see no reasons, ’cause there are no reasons. What reasons do you need, øh øh øh øh? 🎶
   
• A new life awaits you in the off-grid religions. The chance to begin again in a golden void of opportunity and adventure.
   
• However thrilling and “authentic” your new life, a small voice will whisper that it too has no foundation.
   
• “Here I stand; I can do no other” is not a justification. It is a pain cry.
   
• We are all falling, but some have taken their fingers out of their ears, opened their eyes, and stopped chanting.

—————————————————
° The target audience is sporting a black polo neck and muttering “l'existence précède l'essence” or “god is dead” — it doesn’t matter which, so long as the stage whisper is loud enough.

°° But of this be certain: Our Holy Mother will someday eat you.

[mfbrandi]

Broo–Mallia Connection Demystified

• [In the case of a parasitoid] wasp injecting eggs into the living tissue of a caterpillar … there is a third partner involved. To turn the caterpillar into a zombie larder requires a virus that is injected along with the wasp’s eggs. A nice example of mutualism, where both virus and wasp profit from each other.
  — Leon Vlieger, in a review of Frank Ryan’s Virusphere

[John Biles]

On 12/11/2024 at 1:22 PM, mfbrandi said:

Hmm … I’d have thought they’d have gone for modes of limited transposition. Why? Because when one transposes from Chaos to Order, one gets the same pitch classes. (Or so they tell me.) Also, the notes should be evenly spaced — as in a whole-tone or chromatic scale (in 12 TET) — because, you know, no direction home.

I actually meant atonal and screwed up.

Diatonic with its seven notes strikes me as something the Seven Mothers cult would mess around with.

[mfbrandi]

33 minutes ago, John Biles said:

Diatonic with its seven notes strikes me as something the Seven Mothers cult would mess around with.

I like this, and as the days of the week line up differently with the phases of the Moon in different areas, so the modes shift. Whether the heartlands get the major (Ionian) and the most Goddess-forsaken territory gets the Locrian (with its devilish flattened fifth) or the other way about is a measure of just how progressive the Empire really is.

Diatonic 7M may be what Jeff means by saying that the cult is not Chaotic. 😉

[mfbrandi]

1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

• Using a Rune spell literally channels part of the power of a god to affect the Mundane World; it is not an invisible act! The caster always exhibits some form of manifestation of the magical powers at their disposal.
  — RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha (PDF p. 315)

I am not a fan of this — clearly perfectly canonical! — interpretation of magic, and Lanbril doesn’t think much of it either. (Perhaps a dumb theory is called for.)

• ONE WAY: IMMANENCE — The storms of Glorantha are awesome. They are sublime, but they are also mundane. The storm is Orlanth manifest, but that doesn’t mean it is marked out by a funny glow or other cheap SFX. The world is the gods in action (or the runes operating if you are that way inclined) and rune magic taking effect is no more and no less “magical” than other “mundane” events. Magic is a natural part of the world. All the romantics say so.
   
• THE OTHER WAY: MIRACLES (THE PHANTOM ZONE) — In the normal course of events, the world runs on physics (if you’ll forgive that way of putting it), and casting a rune spell is like letting General Zod poke his wretched head out of his prison. Of course it makes the world temporarily resemble a four-colour superhero rag — suddenly garish and two-dimensional, with the halftone patterns painfully apparent. “I saw Spoombung’s daughter consumed by Kirby dots”. Magic is something flashy from the outside (or “the Other Side” if you must). David Hume puts his head in his hands.
   
• NO WAY: IT IS SPOOKIER — If I cast a Crack spell and the thing just cracks — no drum roll, no cymbal crash — isn’t that going to put the willies up people much more than any alternative? If a giant hammer descends from the sky and the target breaks, so what? If it breaks although by everything we know about the world it shouldn’t, then the cracking is uncanny — or at least unexplained and surprising — and that’s magic, as Paul Daniels said to Debbie McGee.° This may sit unhappily with an “all spells, all the time” style of play, but it needn’t come with a tedious backstory about “how the world really works”. Keep it subtle. Keep it anomalous. Keep it plausibly deniable.
   
• LANBRIL’S POSTSCRIPT — Spells of concealment and deception coming with a big red flag at the point of successful casting is just silly … and very annoying.

Do we suspect that Glorantha wants it both ways, as the actress said to the bishop?
 

———————————————————
° That it happened at all should be surprising. The surprise shouldn’t be the accompanying light show.

[davecake]

On 12/5/2024 at 9:38 PM, mfbrandi said:

f the mystic is mistaken for one chasing the right facts — the right incontestable deep description of the world — to unlock [power|revolution|new consciousness|whatever], she will be thought to be cavalier with the facts, to disrespect the truth. But the mystic isn’t setting out to discover what the world is like, she is cultivating a new attitude to the world.

Yes, the mystic isn't setting out to discover the deep secret knowledge of the world (though they might discover some along the way). They are discarding misapprehensions, irrelevancies, and distractions. The quest is to have nothing left to discard. And there is only one Nothing. 

[scott-martin]

5 hours ago, davecake said:

Yes, the mystic isn't setting out to discover the deep secret knowledge of the world (though they might discover some along the way). They are discarding misapprehensions, irrelevancies, and distractions. The quest is to have nothing left to discard. And there is only one Nothing. 

This needs to be written across the sky in giant letters, it's that good. Gloranthan mysticism is almost never generative in the records we have. It simplifies, negates, discards entangling aspects of a world that imprisons the self. This might or might not reflect an apocalyptic current running within inner order lunarism but those looking for constructive gnosis here are still looking. I wonder where in Glorantha they should be looking instead, since in that land every little soul has access to at least a miracle or two.

And I think all the SFX around those miracles are a way to tiptoe around the awkwardness of discrete "spells" separate from Gloranthan reality existing at all. If the world reflects the will and immanent presence of the gods at all points then there are no spell points for us to convert into change in the world. There's just the gods moving through us into the world and the world itself is the SFX. Every tree is Aldrya, every woman is somewhere in the Ernalda complex, every mediated transaction is Issaries, the sun is a Yelm. But this can be challenging to sustain and while the players know when they are deploying spell points, they might be curious or tactically interested in seeing what that looks like from the outside.

So the game provides dramatic cues to other people's magic. To me it is all a little vulgar but fireworks, birthday cakes and transformer movies are also vulgar and people enjoy them, so we can indulge that. All the hoopla is also important because it reminds people that magic is constantly going on in the background so they should be paying attention. Other people's spells are the call to adventure and to revelation. If we aren't enjoying some of that spectacle, it's just gossip.

If I were doing it differently maybe I would not worry too much about assigning NPCs spells or deciding when they will cast them. Maybe I'd just make each scene an encounter with the runes themselves and the NPCs and the spells and the landscape precipitate out of that. But that's hard work, metaphysics and psychoanalysis and god help us, a little poetry. Game manufacturer needs to manufacture "games."

 

[mfbrandi]

On 12/16/2024 at 3:09 PM, scott-martin said:

Gloranthan mysticism … simplifies, negates, discards entangling aspects of a world that imprisons the self.

As we showed the mouse the way out of the maze, we noticed that the mouse’s ego was just one set of bends it had to navigate. The mouse itself was liberated, but only after it had left its “self” behind.

Edited December 17, 2024 by mfbrandi
goddamned tenses

[scott-martin]

Ernalda, I said first.
Issaries, she named her brother.
Orlanth, he named his rival ["shadow"].
Esrolia, they all named, together.
Imarja, I named, last.

[mfbrandi]

4 hours ago, scott-martin said:

Imarja, I named, last.

My agricultural consultant insists that in the ditty above — acrostically speaking — Orlanth should have the final line.

• Old Rogue Orlanth had a farm,
  Ee i ee i oh!
  And on that farm he had a goose,
  Ee i ee i oh!
  With a honk-honk here,
  And a honk-honk there

  Here a honk, there a honk,
  Imarja goes honk-honk
  Old Rogue Orlanth had a farm
  Ee i ee i oh!

Edited December 17, 2024 by mfbrandi