Snakes and dragons

[scott-martin]

16 minutes ago, jajagappa said:

Ah, yes, of course!  And down deep we discover that the Font of Chaosium is actually a turtle belching its secrets into the world. And when it gets tired and decides to turn around after some 600+ years, all the turtles above come toppling down and then they have to slowly climb back up.

I do love a turtle. Now that we're here I wouldn't be surprised if our original source for a lot of this comes from Sofali informants and what I now want to believe is that they have a weird unique spiral astronomy and that their word for sky is bronze.

Dragons, waters, trees, snakes, fruit. EDIT "Apples." I was going to mention the Holiness of the "tide-wracked" Holy Country, half solid and half fluid, but forgot to go there. Golden apples, silver apples. Apple Lanes.

A lot of this was probably developed into whatever form Ernalda Dragon (Ernalda Likita?) was allowed to take inside EWF and then spectacularly suppressed . . . I think this is probably the best answer to the original question. They knew more about these connections and worked them more explicitly than they do today. 

Anyway people don't like to talk about it until the terminal third age reopens all the locked mythic boxes and those ghosts of previous epochs come briefly home. 

Edited October 3, 2020 by scott-martin
hail the harshax

[soltakss]

12 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

A lot of this was probably developed into whatever form Ernalda Dragon (Ernalda Likita?) was allowed to take inside EWF and then spectacularly suppressed . . .

I think that a lot of Ernalda serpent/draconic powers were lost, or suppressed, when the EWF fell, as Ernalda the Dragon didn't have the same ring to it. So, sure, the cult has Serpent Guardians, but they are not as prominent as they might have been. With the Hero Wars, these long-forgotten practices can come to the fore again and be reawakened.

[davecake]

The only source I know of that canonically mentions Naga in Glorantha they are in Pamaltela, fighting Chaos in the Gods War - and this text, while very old, is in the Guide.

Quote

In the southern lands the Chaos monsters were led by Gbaji’s brother Jraktal. This war was fought primarily by Men, including some newly created for the fight, but the Elder Races assisted as well. The main contributors were the Hsunchen, the eldest race of Men. The Ivamali, plant-men, also helped, but they were few in number, and the newest race, the Naga, did not help at all. These defenders were led by Pamalt. He was more successful than his brother Genert, and Jraktal was defeated, though not before he reduced much of the fertile lands to burning sand and pools of acid.

Whether this (like the mention of the Ivameli) is a really old name for a race that is given a different name later (dragonnewts? Lascerdans? Slarges? the little known Yaquma anaconda people, who might be either hsunchen or something else?), or some race that did not survive into the modern era, or something else, is an open question.

Regardless, I think beings like the serpent guardians known in Genertela exist in Pamaltela, but more powerful and plentiful due to the survival of Pamalt, whereas most of those in Genertela died with Genert. 

[scott-martin]

4 hours ago, davecake said:

Regardless, I think beings like the serpent guardians known in Genertela exist in Pamaltela, but more powerful and plentiful due to the survival of Pamalt, whereas most of those in Genertela died with Genert. 

I love it. The veldt could be teeming with lampressae and other expressions of serpent power. Why not a spirit tradition that follows the "snakelines" to give us a way to work with that material? The Six Legged Empire might have called them liki lines. For all I know this is a big deal in mysterious Kimos.

Historically the "naga" in the Jraktal War seem to be the people Greg was elsewhere calling the "nagi" in that era and later lose a letter to become our "agi (-mori, -tori)" of today. While it's a deep pointer to secret history of Pamalt buried in the Nargan wastes, for our modern purposes it would be good to treat this as one of the reptile creations we know now in the south.

(Leaning to thinking of the Ivamali as secret red elf progenitors also, but that's another thread.)