Uleria initiation ceremonies and myths

[hipsterinspace]

6 minutes ago, Eff said:

I would assume that, even if the priesthood offers the girlfriend/boyfriend experience, that the goddess embraces all kinds of sex workers, because it's still intimacy created by the exchange of money. It's like the three entrances to her temple- that's a sex joke. Anything built atop that is built atop the foundation of "Uleria's temples have three entrances just like her body has three holes, har de har", which doesn't invalidate the exegesis, but should, in my opinion, remind us that Uleria is universal and beyond propriety or respectability. Or ought to be. 

The Well of Daliath article on New Pavis seems to disagree.

There’s no need to use watered down terms. Uleria courtesans are sacred companions – hetaira – and not simple streetwalkers. I’m sure there are plenty of those as well.

The importance of of the Courtesan skill to her cult seems to speak to that distinction. Perhaps other sex workers are lay members of Uleria, but her initiated cult seem to be distinct in some ways.

[Eff]

21 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

One uh "riddle" this poses is how such a gf/bf experience maps across competing ernalda/dendara forms of marriage. We know ernalda and dendara initiations are aggressively non-reciprocal but can a sufficiently advanced uleria initiate worship freely in both temples and others besides? Kierkegaard, perhaps perversely, insists that the answer is no. But there are some mighty advanced ulerians out there.

Yes. Well, that's the benefit of being at the top of the twin pyramids of - you get to interact with the opposing arrowheads of two s at odds, or be between two cosmic mountains, depending on your preferences. (Or perhaps both, there was a time when Uleria had runes in her description.) Maybe that's contingent on being able to recognize that there are more entrances than just three, or that if someone thinks they only have two, they actually have at least four. Who can say? I'm running out of euphemisms and need coffee. 

[mfbrandi]

8 hours ago, Eff said:

Maybe that's contingent on being able to recognize that there are more entrances than just three, or that if someone thinks they only have two, they actually have at least four.

But remember poor old Huntun who started out with none and had extra drilled out of ‘gratitude’ — although Gloranthans might shrug and say, “Probably Utuma.”

[Squaredeal Sten]

What does the cult compatibility 

On 3/20/2023 at 10:11 AM, scott-martin said:

One uh "riddle" this poses is how such a gf/bf experience maps across competing ernalda/dendara forms of marriage. We know ernalda and dendara initiations are aggressively non-reciprocal but can a sufficiently advanced uleria initiate worship freely in both temples and others besides? Kierkegaard, perhaps perversely, insists that the answer is no. But there are some mighty advanced ulerians out there.

I don't think Uleria is on the old RQ2 cult compatibility table, but I doubt Uleria is or can be hostile to either one.  What their reciprocal attitudes to Uleroa may be is undefined to my knowledge but it can't be hostile or their adherents would die out.

[David Scott]

6 minutes ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

I don't think Uleria is on the old RQ2 cult compatibility table, but I doubt Uleria is or can be hostile to either one.  What their reciprocal attitudes to Uleroa may be is undefined to my knowledge but it can't be hostile or their adherents would die out.

Uleria is Friendly to all cults, except those of Chaos (either Hostile or Enemy), but Friendly to the Red Goddess...

Most cults are Friendly or Neutral, except those of Chaos (either Hostile or Enemy)

 

[Eff]

14 minutes ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

What does the cult compatibility 

I don't think Uleria is on the old RQ2 cult compatibility table, but I doubt Uleria is or can be hostile to either one.  What their reciprocal attitudes to Uleroa may be is undefined to my knowledge but it can't be hostile or their adherents would die out.

What's interesting about the Uleria-Dendara relationship is what it might imply about Yelm and Dendara's relationship- is Dendara fine with Uleria (are Dendarans fine with Ulerians) because it means Yelm/Yelmites have less sex with her/them, or because Dendarans also have their side pieces? Not that those are the only two options, but given the dynamics of Dendara as a "perfect submissive wife", (with no small hint of irony in the Glorious Reascent, but who knows if it'll be ironic for RQG) there are some fascinating questions to ask about her relationship to sex work and sex workers and the motif of Yelmic sexism and patriarchy.

[scott-martin]

6 minutes ago, Eff said:

fascinating questions

It is quite the flex yes. I suspect the "neutral" rating from the trad solar establishment is more about unspeakableness than a simple shrug. She is literally unfit for ink. But that said, inner Dendara (as she is experienced by initiates, i.e., "women") is not exactly a trad solar establishment figure.

I was talking about reciprocal initiation originally . . . whether the Uleria rites directly translate to Ernalda / Dendara mysteries or why not. Is she a separate entity or simply singing their songs in a different octave, as it were. This is not a trivial question because she . . . and not Ernalda, much less Dendara . . . owns  and so answering the question might reveal something important about that rune in the world right now.
 

The compatibilities are interesting but obviously two gods can be extremely compatible without sharing an initiation or a cult. 

[Squaredeal Sten]

43 minutes ago, Eff said:

What's interesting about the Uleria-Dendara relationship is what it might imply about Yelm and Dendara's relationship- is Dendara fine with Uleria (are Dendarans fine with Ulerians) because it means Yelm/Yelmites have less sex with her/them, or because Dendarans also have their side pieces? Not that those are the only two options, but given the dynamics of Dendara as a "perfect submissive wife", (with no small hint of irony in the Glorious Reascent, but who knows if it'll be ironic for RQG) there are some fascinating questions to ask about her relationship to sex work and sex workers and the motif of Yelmic sexism and patriarchy.

But Uleria is not only sex workers.

And in the godtime was involved in the gods' reproduction too, including Dendara.  Dendara is not likely to be  Associated, but shouldn't be lower than Neutral.

At worst - Maybe the relationship is like with a 'black sheep" cousin who sleeps around a lot. She is still family even if Debdara does not show her off.

But more likely, given the Mesopotamian flavor of Peoria, and ?was it Herodotus who reported on temple prostitution there?  Dendara accepts Uleria as a piece of the culture.  

AFAIK The RW historical record would indicate that most patriarchy is OK with sex workers, and the head patriarchs tend to patronize them when power is (rarely) not a sufficient aphrodisiac to get it free.   At higher social levels the exchange just tends to be jewelry and Influence instead of cash.  

Yes I am sometimes cynical about patriarchy as well as other flavors of hierarchy.

Anyhow, re. Scott-Martin's clarification, I think most of us can see thst Uleria is definitely not the same as the Earth Goddesses, despite some overlap in major functions.  No shared initiation.  They have different secrets.

That doesn't mean the lay membership of the cults are mutually excluded.  IMHO If you have sex excluding rape, you are a lay member of Uleria, no pun intended.  The day Ulerians are excluded from the Dendara temple is the day Peloria starts to die out.

 

Edited March 22, 2023 by Squaredeal Sten
Cynical

[Qizilbashwoman]

On 3/20/2023 at 11:15 AM, hipsterinspace said:

The Well of Daliath article on New Pavis seems to disagree.

There’s no need to use watered down terms. Uleria courtesans are sacred companions – hetaira – and not simple streetwalkers. I’m sure there are plenty of those as well.

The importance of of the Courtesan skill to her cult seems to speak to that distinction. Perhaps other sex workers are lay members of Uleria, but her initiated cult seem to be distinct in some ways.

i'd like to make a note here that if a hetaira has sex with someone, it's because she wants to, not because she's paid. her major attraction is that in highly sex-segregated societies, such as ancient Greece and modern Japan ("modern" here meaning the era from about 1500 until 1945), the ability to have an emotional and intellectual connection with women was highly valued.

also, the ancient "sacred priestesses" as providing sex is not true. modern scholars do not believe it actually happened. in fact, these individuals had extraordinary rights under the laws of their societies.

what does this mean for Uleria? well, your glorantha will vary, but it's going to vary from society to society. Certainly Uleria in settled Solar societies like our Yelmic friends would have been a courtesan, but what that means for tribal societies or for Pavis proper I sincerely do not know since sex segregation essentially doesn't exist.

So who is Dendera and Uleria to Yelm in pre-lunar times? The chaste wife versus the companion.

Edited March 22, 2023 by Qizilbashwoman

[Eff]

54 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

It is quite the flex yes. I suspect the "neutral" rating from the trad solar establishment is more about unspeakableness than a simple shrug. She is literally unfit for ink. But that said, inner Dendara (as she is experienced by initiates, i.e., "women") is not exactly a trad solar establishment figure.

I was talking about reciprocal initiation originally . . . whether the Uleria rites directly translate to Ernalda / Dendara mysteries or why not. Is she a separate entity or simply singing their songs in a different octave, as it were. This is not a trivial question because she . . . and not Ernalda, much less Dendara . . . owns  and so answering the question might reveal something important about that rune in the world right now.
 

The compatibilities are interesting but obviously two gods can be extremely compatible without sharing an initiation or a cult. 

Yes. You have that motif, don't you? Uleria being feared or hated, and obviously part of that comes, in origin, from the desire to differentiate "our" mode of existence from "their" mode of existence- we think love is good, but these traditional people think love is suspicious and disruptive, and another part of it comes from the vicissitudes of desire, romance, sex, love, and human relationships. And then Uleria's property rights over that hourglass suggest, perhaps, that she's making a statement that Life, as a force, complicates and makes things difficult. Biological exuberance, if you will. 

So in that case, the "reciprocal initiation", the ability to participate and get juiced up, may well be this whimsical, mutable, difficult-to-predict thing. Among the various things Uleria serves, perhaps we can find "headaches" as well. 

1 hour ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

But Uleria is not only sex workers.

I'm going off of the working assumption (which I suspect will likely never really be contradicted editorially) for the purposes of discussing multiple Gloranthas at once that divine cults don't vary significantly from place to place- that if Uleria is there, you get the whole shebang, rather than Pelorian Uleria having only two entrances to her temples (Lodril and Shargash are definitely into that in any case) and the sex work aspect, or the intimacy work aspect if you prefer, being carefully removed. 

And from that, you might think that "good women" like Dendara or her cultists as they are typically presented would perhaps resent the Ulerians who don't play the game of being good and who represent a kind of diffuse existential threat to Dendara/ns. But if that's not the case, then further exploration and development and playfulness is needed. 

(Going by those old Greg notes which equated Dendara with Vishnu and Yelm with Brahma, perhaps the conventional fan understanding of Dendara has been a bit anemic. Severely irony-deficient. Or maybe Greg wasn't aware of the story about Vishnu-as-Mohini attempting to seduce Brahma.) 

[Qizilbashwoman]

31 minutes ago, Eff said:

And from that, you might think that "good women" like Dendara or her cultists as they are typically presented would perhaps resent the Ulerians who don't play the game of being good and who represent a kind of diffuse existential threat to Dendara/ns. But if that's not the case, then further exploration and development and playfulness is needed. 

i do really think it is going to be worlds different to be an Ulerian priest in Esrolia versus pre-Lunar Dara Happa, or Solar Dara Happa versus Pentans.

[hipsterinspace]

2 hours ago, scott-martin said:

I was talking about reciprocal initiation originally . . . whether the Uleria rites directly translate to Ernalda / Dendara mysteries or why not. Is she a separate entity or simply singing their songs in a different octave, as it were. This is not a trivial question because she . . . and not Ernalda, much less Dendara . . . owns  and so answering the question might reveal something important about that rune in the world right now

They are friendly, but, per Well of Daliath, Uleria has no associates. They can participate in rites together without much difficulty, but how could you ask a mother to choose her favorite child?

[Squaredeal Sten]

So back to the topic of Ulerian initiation ceremonies...

What culture is this Adventurer from, wat culture is your campaign in??  That will make a diffetence.

Has this player already made a backstory for the Ulerian Adventurer?

What do you and/ or the player  envision the typical path to initiation is?  Or is this a non typical path?

Possibilitie I can see, which don't deny or exclude other possibilities you can see, include:

1. A Six Season style adulthood Initiation in which one choice or path taken reveals an affinity for Uleria, just as other alternatives to Ernalda include Babeester Gor.

2. A career path: start out as an amateur and go for pro. Listen to all that advice to do work you like.

3. City Uleria temple, or Apple Lane temple, offers instruction.  Sensible young people may take the course(s). Sex Ed with a religious component combined with Poli Sci when you get to love binding society together.   Reminds me of that passage in Cults of Prax, "know arts of Uleria", you know some knowledge & skills can come in handy.  Sometimes you take the intro course and choose it for your major.  Sometimes people want to know more about Uleria.  Loving the whole world...isn't that positive and constructive like joining the Peace Corps?   Three years later, initiation...  

4. Intercultural exchange as it were, per the current Apple Lane, in which 

Spoiler

The second initiate is a former Lunar Courtesan (how the Lunars treat this occupation is not specified but presumably We Are All Us handles this) refugee from the Dragonrise revolution, who comes to Uleria to continue  her occupation.  

Just thoughts, hopefully relevant to the OP's campaign planning.

 

[hipsterinspace]

1 hour ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

Just thoughts, hopefully relevant to the OP's campaign planning.

It's a two-year-old thread that you revived, so I doubt it remains a pressing concern.

As for how to run the initiation itself, I think David's advice is really the best that anyone can ask for:

Quote

[T]he initiation should encompass all three aspects, likely as a test. So the first story would be Uleria courts (who ever is available). Any player of a different cult can play the opposite role. The second could be whenever a group is made, so Uleria's presence at the group's clan making or other bonding moment. Propagation part is causing something to reproduce in the quest.

Heroquests being impressions and archetypes rather than strict stages like King of Dragon Pass means you can do some really interesting stuff with this, especially given Uleria's breadth.

[radmonger]

3 hours ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

i do really think it is going to be worlds different to be an Ulerian priest in Esrolia versus pre-Lunar Dara Happa, or Solar Dara Happa versus Pentans.

Absolutely. Not least because i think it was the lunars who, via Etyries, introduced the concept of personal spending money to Dara Happa. Before that it was more a matter of the emperor, or his delegate, paying the Ulerian temple in wheels to hold a festival on a certain date each year. With admission restricted to whatever clan, regiment or guild had won his favor.

Such festivals were basically city-based versions of the traditional Lodrili fertility festivals; an opportunity to meet, dance and drink with other people with the same plan. Ulerian initiates made up the numbers, and got the party started, but there was nothing transactional going on.

Actual sex workers in anything like the modern sense are more likely to be initiates of Issaries or Etyries. The exchange of money for services is the thing that would need magical support.

 

 

[Squaredeal Sten]

1 hour ago, hipsterinspace said:

It's a two-year-old thread that you revived, so I doubt it remains a pressing concern.

As for how to run the initiation itself, I think David's advice is really the best that anyone can ask for:

Heroquests being impressions and archetypes rather than strict stages like King of Dragon Pass means you can do some really interesting stuff with this, especially given Uleria's breadth.

Oh, i hadn't been thinking of that.

So how did it turn out with the Ulerian Adventurer?

 

[scott-martin]

10 hours ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

I think most of us can see thst Uleria is definitely not the same as the Earth Goddesses, despite some overlap in major functions.  No shared initiation.  They have different secrets.

This is a uh "fertile" insight validated by @hipsterinspace with the great observation that Uleria has no modern associates and no major modern cult has a special association with her. She is simultaneously ubiquitous ("everyone" is theoretically a lay member) and alone. Her spells are unique, not shared. Her initiation is, as you say, separate . . . "non reciprocal," although they welcome people who are already adult members of other cults.

What's interesting for me in this revolves around who takes the double initiation and how separating the initiations works out in practice. Anyone can get married, have children and presumably engage in some form of Love without having any conscious contact with Uleria whatsoever. Ernalda or presumably (?) Dendara initiation is all it takes. Maybe this means that in some Gloranthas children conceived within wedlock sprout from cabbages or through whatever rococo process you care to postulate. Maybe it means these goddesses derive from Uleria (as old-school "high god") in some way and so "pass through" her sexual powers as part of their standard cult experience. 

And Uleria likewise has her own pregnancy magic that runs parallel to Ernalda's (and presumably Dendara's) spells but does not necessarily stack. It's a separate sacrifice, compatible with but not identical to the blessings the wife goddesses normally provide. Competitive. Because Ernalda and Dendara have Fertility, they can support their form of baby making. But because Uleria IS Fertility, I have a feeling the Uleria spells are the more universal or "natural." They may not be original but they came first. Rites of spring.

Modern Uleria even has an entire aspect or methodology that revolves around motherhood. (As written, her reproductive magic is gendered.)  Some of this magic resurfaces independently within Ernalda as the midwife subcult, but the spell unique to her alone allows initiates to move a fetus from womb to womb . . . which subverts the marital-maternal bond even in its altruistic applications. You can be a surrogate. Or if the other woman (see parenthesis above) wants or needs to remain chaste for some reason, you can be the one who conceives and then send the child over for something like a virginal or otherwise ritually pure birth. Suddenly there can be all kinds of babies happening outside the conventional "a mommy and a daddy love each other very much" framework . . . even before you start having oxytocin nightmares around witchcraft.

But IMG this is the point of modern Uleria. Babies happen outside any wife goddess regime or "girlfriend experience." Motherhood does not belong to the marriage goddesses. Sometimes the roles intersect, sometimes they don't. And ultimately both Ernalda and Dendara will concede that just as they will never admit identity with each other, they are not identical with Uleria either. They may be three routes to similar magic but they are not interchangeable. (Sorry, @Eff I mysteriously do not rise to the bait although surely only one of the portals is "fertile.") All can be mothers. Uleria feels no need to be a wife except on the most transactional basis. This is my Kierkegaard joke: the roles are not transitive. Once you opt into an authentic marriage role, you are opting out of Uleria. She needs to initiate elsewhere to buy into the husband-protector complex.

Last I looked, Eiritha and the Grain Goddesses (including modern Pela and Oria) don't get pregnancy spells, by the way. Motherhood is not part of their portfolio and is not even granted through association. You need to initiate elsewhere to get those spells. Maybe they had those spells once but not now. Likewise, Ernalda (and undoubtedly Dendara) regulate love: if you aren't at least a lay member of an earth queen cult, you cannot procreate without angering the earth forces. Fertility doesn't care. Earth is the jealous goddess.

IMG the Earth cults are expanding at the expense of more archaic and local Fertility forms. The implications for a gloranthan feminism are interesting as Raw Fertility and the theoretical primal goddess religion recede in the face of more or less heteronormative condominiums, theogamies. Sure, he said, staring at the Marija Gimbutas up on the shelf. That's how it goes. The undifferentiated and polymorphous libido of the Uleria force, her very "perversity," ends up repressed in a world of stable relationships. 

But everything repressed can return. And as one or more of the wives rise toward achieving transcendental status, they may find themselves converging with the most archaic of the forms once more. The feminine consciousness expands in as many directions as exist and maybe some that don't yet.

Who is missing from these equations? A white goddess who is a mother and never a wife. A red goddess who does what she wants, wife or girlfriend or mother or daughter depending on the way the light falls in that moment. An old goddess who fell in love with a wild boy once and broke the world. (Some say she was a former wife and mother who followed her own bliss and became an uleria, devil be damned.) Various "perpetual virgins," real and euphemistic. And that's just off the top of my head, you can undoubtedly name others. Whatever's going on with Entekos. Scary monsters.

Edited March 23, 2023 by scott-martin
jardin clos, jealousy and then jouissance

[Eff]

1 hour ago, scott-martin said:

(Sorry, @Eff I mysteriously do not rise to the bait although surely only one of the portals is "fertile.")

To sketch out something very silly, there are several instances of, well, oral fertility that seem to be taking place, but they're trolls and spiders (and scorpions, but we don't talk about that silly Cults of Terror Bagog writeup). So you can perhaps imagine an... ur-Uleria who had a less differentiated approach to this kind of thing. Meanwhile, Dara Happans call that light blue planet "Uleria" because it never enters the Underworld, and we know that Uleria is changed or perhaps diminished from her primordial state. So perhaps those dweebs with their beards and their hatred of alla boscaiola were onto something- there's something associated with the powers of the dark that the common Uleria has no or limited interactions with. (I actually think that, whatever some to-be-published book or preview says, the parthenogenetic magic hinted at for Ernalda's cult is another shattered piece of Uleria- spontaneous germination. You could even push this further into goat-headed territory, but that's heavier stuff and gets right into the controversial Rashoran questions.)

So perhaps we can find a motif here wherein the primordial "Glorantay" or "Celestial Court" were also the subjects of a kind of usurpation or shattering that broke their multivalent and ambiguous concepts into smaller pieces.* Like cosmic cartoon mice nibbling at a torch and making a dozen torches. However, Uleria survives (perhaps because her concept is just intrinsically sticky) and the usurpation is left incomplete. So I think that it may well be a kind of cyclic ebb and flow- you have times when the more normie normative goddesses largely displace Uleria and render her marginal, but you also have times where Uleria, smirking, steps into the smoldering void after everything's fallen apart and puts herself back at the center of things.

Where do the tricolor goddesses fit into this? Well, Uleria and the red one are the two big connection points to the orthocosmic Ishtar nexus, and, what do you know, they share some pieces in the modestly deep lore, too, don't they? What falls out from that? Well, there's an answer I can give, but there's a limit to how much subliminal libidinality I can stuff into a post, believe it or not.

 

*

[scott-martin]

10 minutes ago, Eff said:

trolls and spiders

I had a note for them but lost it in the erotocomatose hangover. Modern trolls do not have a native source of vanilla pregnancy magic or even a whole lot of Fertility . . . Korasting being broken to the point where she can only mitigate the enlo mutation, XU supporting the mommy-daddy-flipping couvade. (Cue the XU hermeneuticians or hermenXUticians.) Despite the all-mother mystique, KL no longer provides anything except, interestingly enough, cross-species adoption rites. 

But then again, I also liked the "nymph" origin story for Cragspider as an underpinning for her fixation on restoring troll fertility. The "nymphs" are tilntae, right? Not dryads. Not gnomes. 

And Asrelia, like osiris, is technically a black goddess according to Troll Gods, for what that's worth.

[mfbrandi]

10 hours ago, scott-martin said:

Uleria (as old-school "high god")

Although even dipping into the Well of Daliath might lead one to think her an impostor or a pathetic remnant. (And I am sure we can cook up something more heterodox than the WoD version.)

Spoiler

Uleria represents Love in all its forms: eros, agape, lust, platonic, etc. She commands those powers which bring things or people together. She may be the only deity of the Celestial Court to survive the Great Darkness, though some believe that that being which is worshiped in her name is only a small portion of the whole of Uleria, or is actually another goddess with identical powers, attributes, and appearance. — WoD

And Uleria does seem to tie into some whoppers — no one is going to buy any of this nonsense (without some prince of lies as (m)ad man):

10 hours ago, scott-martin said:

“a mommy and a daddy love each other very much”

Quote

Love is the invisible Life Force energy which can fill and permeate anything physical, spiritual, or magical …

Erotocomatose lucidity … the ecstatic Oneness experienced during the moment of sexual climax. — Gods of Glorantha: Cults Book, pp. 73–74

A cult whose devotees are taught a skill whose “tools and media are human bodies” has to sound a bit creepy, right? And presumably erotocomatose lucidity comes to us via ‘the wickedest man in the world’, ‘the great beast’, who — “even if unlike most braggarts had actually done some of the things he boasted of” (I forget who said that) — is best described as what, the Christian fundamentalist id let off the leash? The return of the repressed?

Don’t you just want the Uleria cult to be a hiding-in-plain-sight mask of capital ‘D’ Devil worshippers? I mean, subbing for the true “energy which can fill and permeate anything” — — as it slouches toward Bethlehem to be born: MGF!

And if you want a Mallia connection (I don’t, really):

Spoiler

The poem is also connected to the 1918–1919 flu pandemic. In the weeks preceding Yeats's writing of the poem, his pregnant wife, Georgie Hyde-Lees, caught the virus and was very close to death, but she survived. The highest death rates of the pandemic were among pregnant women, who in some areas had a death rate of up to 70%. Yeats wrote the poem while his wife was convalescing. — Wikipedia: The Second Coming

11 hours ago, scott-martin said:

The implications for a gloranthan feminism are interesting as Raw Fertility and the theoretical primal goddess religion recede

The feminists might do well to shun all of this feminine mystique. I hear that Shulamith has done a deal with the Mostali to free women from childbearing — “Feminists have to question, not just all of [Gloranthan] culture, but the organization of culture itself, and further, even the organization of nature.”

[scott-martin]

1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

slouches toward Bethlehem

A while back people were looking for shamanic traditions that incorporated a "Bad Woman" and if I recall correctly our friend Mallia showed up as cosmic adversary for any shamanically oriented healers . . . maybe most goddesses have a bright side and a night side that cycle around them like shadows on a moon. We talk a lot about the night side goddesses who restrict their violence to men and not much about those who harbor special vindictiveness against other women.

Real Talk: I think player sympathy tends to favor Uleria as a more of a victim goddess than an active witch cult . . . her enemies are portrayed as the repressed ones, Edward Woodward going crazy sweating in the room above the tavern as Britt Ekland's butt double bumps and slaps the wall between them. Hard to fight that intrinsic bias even if you wanted to.

But as an alternative to the earth queens, where does Uleria come from? Was there an original center here as with GLORANTAY, some historical spike from which the ideas propagated, sticking in some places and getting washed away in others? How much does modern Uleria owe to the Pelandan goddess complex (which has lost or simply hidden its pregnancy magic, the pedant intones), and if so, which strands in particular? Which cultures embraced her from the dawn times onward and which ones shut the doors when they heard the temple bells? Who still loves free love and who thinks of witch stories?

The moon is red but the blue planet is blue, talk about your madonna and your whore.

[Eff]

2 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Don’t you just want the Uleria cult to be a hiding-in-plain-sight mask of capital ‘D’ Devil worshippers? I mean, subbing for the true “energy which can fill and permeate anything” — — as it slouches toward Bethlehem to be born: MGF!

Well, not so much. It would be better than a cult that exists to perform emotional labor under a sexuality so fetishized the orgasm disappears, yes. But we can do better. Ul-Eria's got plenty of menace just from good old Zoria, after all. 

[mfbrandi]

1 hour ago, scott-martin said:

Real Talk: I think player sympathy tends to favor Uleria as a more of a victim goddess … her enemies are portrayed as the repressed ones

I tend to think — and I must stress that I do not know this to be true; I can live without the hate mail — that the “porno chic” Uleria appeals to people (dare I say boys?) who have a cop-in-the-head Puritan to throw off. Those of us who never had a bad case of that (or so we tell ourselves) may be seen as sneering at other people’s sex-worker fantasies — so “anti-sex”, “uptight”, or “no fun”. Sounds like the ’70s redux. And you know, I have been called worse.

So I was maybe poking a little fun at an imagined Gloranthaphile who railed against anything Chaos “tainted” but — what shall we say? — trouser-tented over the sex/love/life three-for-one bundle of heteronormativity we could label “Uleria”.

Me? I’m with .

[mfbrandi]

1 hour ago, Eff said:

Well, not so much … we can do better.

Ah, well, I came to bury Uleria, not to praise her (and without any of that complex Shakespearean irony — I am a simple fellow). 😉

[scott-martin]

21 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

who have a cop-in-the-head Puritan to throw off

I'm sure we've all met someone like that but I hear you, opening oneself up to the hate mail seems "a rather stupid kind of mischief." The fans like her. She's having a moment. I'm here to psychoanalyze her and not the fans. I don't have an extremely high tolerance for the Grateful Dead but love the "Mountains of the Moon" they did for Hugh Hefner though, which probably reveals something about me and a lunarized ulEria. Surely as the empire reaches like Winnicott's baby for the summits of negation (and the depths of creation) their magicians need to negotiate every wisp of the transcendent they can find, especially one they consider still present enough to have its own planet. White Moon, Red Moon, Blue Planet Woman? CA speaks for Harmony and Uleria speaks for Fertility. Vanished Dayzatar owns Truth. 

We have already mentioned the Evangelical cults with their ferocious devil-god who creates mankind for the pleasure of damning it and forcing it to crawl before him, while he yells with drunken glee over the agony of his only son. But in the same class, we must place Christian Science, so grotesquely afraid of pain, suffering and evil of every sort, that its dupes can think of nothing better than to bleat denials of its actuality, in the hope of hypnotizing themselves into anaesthesia.