Solar Campaign

[metcalph]

I think the Logicians came in with the Blue People being Waertagi allies but hung around after YarGan's defeat.  The Entekosiad p36 mentions a sorceror, Gurgo, who helps Daxdarius to become a God which is quite some time later.  Velortina p54 is another Logician given that her primciple "Humans are responsible for the world, even if/though the gods are not" is a clear expression of Humanism.

So I think that while the first Logicians were Malkioni, their philosophy found fertile root in Pelanda and so they became to be seen as indigenous.  Greg at one point said that they were a forerunner of the Vizier schools of the Carmanians (presumably not the Magi).

Dara Happan sorcery seems to come much later in the Great Darkness and Gray Age.  Buserian is praying to enter the Mind of Dayzatar on p65 (shades of henosis) and the magics he uses then are described in the Lunar Way as Sorcery Spells.  When the Starseers came to Yuthuppa p70, they deny having Gods.

 

Edited October 8 by metcalph

[None]

1 hour ago, davecake said:

I find it pretty interesting that, on a closer look, it is pretty clear that what we think modern, or even early First Age, Buserian worship is like is clearly not what what Buserian worship was like before that, because so much of modern Buserian worship seems to have originated with the Stargazers in the Great Darkness and it is clearly considered to be very different by the Yuthuppans. 

 

1 hour ago, metcalph said:

Dara Happan sorcery seems to come much later in the Great Darkness and Gray Age.  Buserian is praying to enter the Mind of Dayzatar on p65 (shades of henosis) and the magics he uses then are described in the Lunar Way as Sorcery Spells.  When the Starseers came to Yuthuppa p70, they deny having Gods.

Too much to quote 😰. Seriously though it was an interesting read even if I feel a lot over went over my head and would require an atlas to trace the movements of all those people as IO don't recognize the names. What I got from this is that while Sorcery is more accepted in Dara Happa and Peloria in general than among the Orlanthi it took a while for it to appear, together with Buserian. The most interesting part was that Buserian wasn't part of the solar pantheon until the tail end of the Golden Age and and gained a lot of ground when the theistic magic of the solars began to wane during the Great Darkness.

[davecake]

4 hours ago, None said:

What I got from this is that while Sorcery is more accepted in Dara Happa and Peloria in general than among the Orlanthi it took a while for it to appear, together with Buserian.

There aren't myths about sorcery in early Dara Happen myths, and few at all in general Dara Happan myth, but that means there are few myths about sorcery as an enemy power too. 

5 hours ago, None said:

The most interesting part was that Buserian wasn't part of the solar pantheon until the tail end of the Golden Age and and gained a lot of ground when the theistic magic of the solars began to wane during the Great Darkness.

Buserian appears as you say, in a few earlier myths, as a priest in the myths of Anaxial (flood era) and in the Murharzarm myths (including setting one of the Ten Tests). 

Buserian is Overseer of Abgammon, the city of priests,  on the Gods Wall, in the time of Murharzarm. AbGammon is to the near east of Raibanth. I don't think it corresponds to any known real city. It is destroyed in the flood, and the Buserian worshippers move to Yuthuppa. 

And before those myths, he is identified with the planet Zator, which is destroyed when Umath appears, and instead become many stars. 

But this could all, of course, be Plentonius trying to edit Dara Happan myth to show that all the disparate things that form the official mythology of the Dara Happan Empire of Khordavu always have been part of the Glorious solar Empire since the time of Yelm, even if the evidence is a bit flimsy, and there certainly is no real evidence that the Starseers of his time (whose magic was learnt from foreign wandering atheist astronomers in the Darkness) had anything to do with the earlier Buserian cult. But it would be awkward for anyone to say to. 

[davecake]

7 hours ago, metcalph said:

I think the Logicians came in with the Blue People being Waertagi allies but hung around after YarGan's defeat.  The Entekosiad p36 mentions a sorceror, Gurgo, who helps Daxdarius to become a God which is quite some time later.

The mention of them in the Three Errors story might suggest earlier, and the YarGan story says the supports them, not brings them, but they certainly don't seem to have been of historical importance before then whether or not they were known prior. I do think they remain long after YarGan is cast down and they no longer have such political prominence. 

8 hours ago, metcalph said:

Velortina p54 is another Logician given that her primciple "Humans are responsible for the world, even if/though the gods are not" is a clear expression of Humanism.

Given that the Lunars believe that Velortina was an incarnation of Sedenya (pg 81), it seems they would disagree. 

And that, while Velortina acknowledges the gods have failed, she recommends further appeal to be the gods, and following higher principles beyond the gods like Cosmic Justice, makes it unlikely she is simply a humanist. The Velortinian principles and the Hagu story are a mystic story of cosmic rebirth, not bleak humanism in which the gods have no worth. 

8 hours ago, metcalph said:

So I think that while the first Logicians were Malkioni, their philosophy found fertile root in Pelanda and so they became to be seen as indigenous.  Greg at one point said that they were a forerunner of the Vizier schools of the Carmanians (presumably not the Magi).

Well, lets just say they there are degrees of indigenous, and they are considered newcomers compared to the Wendarians, but prior to most other groups. 

They certainly are a forerunner of the Vizier schools, but one of the several forerunners, they of course also owe a lot to the Syranthir Forefront and his Loskalmi Irensavalism. And YarGan's cannibal god Estero is I think later Westernised to become Ganesatarus the god of evil, worshipped when permitted, which I think includes many of the Logicians magic otherwise condemned in Pelandan myth. Plus of course, Carmanos combines his fathers Irensavalism  directly with the magic of his mothers people, the hidden Blue People of Castle Blue, so is able to directly access the magic of YarGan and the Blue People, not just their survivals among the surviving Pelandan sorcerers. Modern Carmanian belief is a complex tapestry. I think mostly the ancient Logicians etc are considered among the Dark Side of Carmanian dualism.

[Eff]

1 hour ago, davecake said:

Given that the Lunars believe that Velortina was an incarnation of Sedenya (pg 81), it seems they would disagree. 

And that, while Velortina acknowledges the gods have failed, she recommends further appeal to be the gods, and following higher principles beyond the gods like Cosmic Justice, makes it unlikely she is simply a humanist. The Velortinian principles and the Hagu story are a mystic story of cosmic rebirth, not bleak humanism in which the gods have no worth. 

I'm not sure why we would assume that Sedenya, an entity that has been both god and human, one with a hand in all kinds of magic and worship, is necessarily intrinsically opposed to humanism or a "humanist" worldview. Not least because the Velortinian principles, which assert the agency of humans to choose how they interact with gods, rather than fully subjugating themselves to them, rejecting them wholly, or keeping them at arm's length and practicing non-intervention, really don't fit anywhere except in the sorcerous domain. 

[davecake]

19 hours ago, Eff said:

I'm not sure why we would assume that Sedenya, an entity that has been both god and human, one with a hand in all kinds of magic and worship, is necessarily intrinsically opposed to humanism or a "humanist" worldview.

I don't think she is particularly opposed to it. She appears to have no great beef with sorcery or humanism. But she is a mystic, not a humanist per se. 

20 hours ago, Eff said:

Not least because the Velortinian principles, which assert the agency of humans to choose how they interact with gods, rather than fully subjugating themselves to them, rejecting them wholly, or keeping them at arm's length and practicing non-intervention, really don't fit anywhere except in the sorcerous domain. 

That is how it appears if you take the Velortinian principles and remove everything in them that isn't just about humans or gods. If the question was 'are the Velortinian principles closer to humanism or theism', then that would be fine. But that isn't the question, and so it is a misrepresentation. They say we should subordinate our individual human feelings to maintaining our link to Cosmic Justice, which is a principle above the gods. Call it mystic (which it clearly is closest to of the four Gloranthan categorisations or magic path), call it gnostic if you wish (only those who maintain their link with Order can see Cosmic Justice), even call it Antinomian if you want (if we maintain our state of Grace/Order, are released from our obligations to follow the laws of the gods - ok, a bit of a stretch). But it's not straightforward humanism - it rejects the gods, but by positing something above the gods. 

She is packed full of Lunar Secrets, and the Lunars are not straight humanists. 

[Eff]

2 hours ago, davecake said:

That is how it appears if you take the Velortinian principles and remove everything in them that isn't just about humans or gods. If the question was 'are the Velortinian principles closer to humanism or theism', then that would be fine. But that isn't the question, and so it is a misrepresentation. They say we should subordinate our individual human feelings to maintaining our link to Cosmic Justice, which is a principle above the gods. Call it mystic (which it clearly is closest to of the four Gloranthan categorisations or magic path), call it gnostic if you wish (only those who maintain their link with Order can see Cosmic Justice), even call it Antinomian if you want (if we maintain our state of Grace/Order, are released from our obligations to follow the laws of the gods - ok, a bit of a stretch). But it's not straightforward humanism - it rejects the gods, but by positing something above the gods.

At the risk of being overly blunt, the Velortinian principles are concerned with the material world, human responsibility to care for it, and an abstract principle that nevertheless can be thought about and described which binds the gods underneath it. 

If that's mysticism, it's a mysticism which is unconcerned with transcendence of the material world, which indeed treats the material world as valuable in its own right, and which focuses on a knowable concept which orders the world. I personally wouldn't call Marcus Tullius Cicero a mystic because of his argument that reason and reasoning bind the gods and are greater than they, and that is what Velortinianism most closely resembles with its concept of cosmic justice. 

And the worldview communicated is one that is essentially humanistic (in the real-world term, rather than the unusual way in which Glorantha fandom uses it), setting humans at the center of this revelation- "humans have a responsibility to and for the world, even if the gods don't" is one where human actions are fundamentally more important to the philosophy than those of supernatural beings. Appealing to "Lunar Secrets" cannot outweigh that, unless we wish to take the position that there is a secret meaning that pneumatics and sarkics cannot recognize and so cannot be found via textual analysis, and at that point we've moved into the realm of pure assertions. 

Instead, perhaps what we could take from this is that Lunar philosophy incorporates this humanistic approach into itself, without that being the totality of the philosophy. 

[davecake]

13 hours ago, Eff said:

And the worldview communicated is one that is essentially humanistic (in the real-world term, rather than the unusual way in which Glorantha fandom uses it)

Perhaps this is the core of the discussion here - if you are arguing a broader philosophical sense of humanism outside of the specific Gloranthan context, then there is no reason to assume it has anything to do with sorcery use, which was where the discussion of Velortina as humanist started. 

And some of that is because a broader philosophical humanism does not distinguish between different types of magic, or treat the magical world of gods and spirits as an objectively observable reality, whereas philosophy must  in Glorantha because that is there world. In Glorantha, transcending the material world isn't enough to be 'mystic', because the non-material world is largely objective and observable and responsive to predictable laws as well, it must transcend the observable rules of the magical world which I think Velortina does indeed argue for. 

And i think she isn't using Cosmic Justice as a stand-in for rationality and reason, but for something discernible only through individual gnosis, but that is getting into what is extrapolated from context not directly stated. If Cosmic Justice was just a rational principle, why would the Lunars think that was one of their secrets? The Lunar mythology is full of people invoking Cosmic Justice through seemingly irrational acts, and acts that can only be understood through direct extreme experience not reason, IMO - extreme self sacrifice etc. 

But anyway, if we can agree that the Velortinan principles do not appear to be closely tied to sorcery (given it doesn't feature in the Hagu story at all), that is my basic point. Though to assume its not tied to mysticism as the Lunars understand it (and therefore Illumination, etc) would be to take the commentary by Valere Addi and the later Lunar voices with an extreme degree of suspicious - they may be subtly wrong at points, but I take them to be sincere and informed, and more reliable than eg Plentonius. 

[Eff]

3 hours ago, davecake said:

Perhaps this is the core of the discussion here - if you are arguing a broader philosophical sense of humanism outside of the specific Gloranthan context, then there is no reason to assume it has anything to do with sorcery use, which was where the discussion of Velortina as humanist started. 

And some of that is because a broader philosophical humanism does not distinguish between different types of magic, or treat the magical world of gods and spirits as an objectively observable reality, whereas philosophy must  in Glorantha because that is there world. In Glorantha, transcending the material world isn't enough to be 'mystic', because the non-material world is largely objective and observable and responsive to predictable laws as well, it must transcend the observable rules of the magical world which I think Velortina does indeed argue for. 

And i think she isn't using Cosmic Justice as a stand-in for rationality and reason, but for something discernible only through individual gnosis, but that is getting into what is extrapolated from context not directly stated. If Cosmic Justice was just a rational principle, why would the Lunars think that was one of their secrets? The Lunar mythology is full of people invoking Cosmic Justice through seemingly irrational acts, and acts that can only be understood through direct extreme experience not reason, IMO - extreme self sacrifice etc. 

But anyway, if we can agree that the Velortinan principles do not appear to be closely tied to sorcery (given it doesn't feature in the Hagu story at all), that is my basic point. Though to assume its not tied to mysticism as the Lunars understand it (and therefore Illumination, etc) would be to take the commentary by Valere Addi and the later Lunar voices with an extreme degree of suspicious - they may be subtly wrong at points, but I take them to be sincere and informed, and more reliable than eg Plentonius. 

I mean, I am taking the position that sorcery and broader humanism are linked, just that humanism (and sorcery) aren't limited to the caricatures of modernity that are increasingly applied to them, but rather that sorcery, magic which places the individual human as the prime mover for its spells and grimoires, is intertwined with the whole range of philosophies that center humanity or, more broadly, mortal entities and their importance as a consquence of that definition.

I think you're somewhat missing the point of "material world" there- Gloranthan mysticism is consistently described as renunciate and, when properly practiced, rejects the importance of the inhabitants of the perceptual world except as they are signposts or ladder rungs to break free of it. A philosophical proposition which exalts entanglement with the perceptual world through taking responsibility for its care is thus extremely torturous to read as an expression of mysticism. 

I think that for my part, I read "Lunar secrets" not as "this woman has access to what is secret knowledge today" but "this woman says things that I, Valare, heard from Teelo Imara herself, or that are clearly behind what Teelo Imara spoke and preached". Not that anything about what Velortina said is necessarily intellectual property (metaphorically) of the Lunar Way TM (C) but rather that the Lunar Way is something which has evolved through the course of existence and which brings together many thoughts and ideas expressed by many people, all of them understood as incarnating the "changing power". 

Because what we see in the Hagu story is human activity in the absence of gods or other spiritual beings restarting the universe and bringing it back to life. If that's not sorcery, in a Gloranthan context, what else could it reasonably be? Corrupt mysticism that acted to revive materiality? 

And then we can see the Entekosiad laying out a case for how the shamanic practices and the Logicians and (though this is only fragmentary) the Carmanians and the worshipers of the Low Gods and the Jernotian mystics are all interrelated to one another. It is possible to climb Gerra's pyramid and return, and by listening to Valare, people were able to enter the presence of Jernotia and liberate Kagardu. In other words, the Entekosiad Lunarizes the cosmology by interrelating the magical systems/worldviews with each other, just as the Lunar Way does the same thing with the magic directly. 

[scott-martin]

"All sorcery is immature humanism." If I were running a solar campaign I would heighten the tension between the proles' lives of tedious alienation and the essential moments of epiphany that reveal the cloistered mysteries of their world.

The characters are a motley bunch of urban dwellers brought together, largely for their skills, probably under the direction of some eccentric (minor) aristocrat. They come from various family situations and give various degrees of weight to their ancestral patrons . . . most struggle to name more than a grandfather or two or have more than a spirit spell taught down from the generations. That's fine. They learn what they need to do in the course of their early lives, through encounters and deals with various bosses, co-workers, religious societies, walks on the wild side.

The wyters they encounter are almost never "theirs" but always belong to the imperial state or someone else, leaving them largely alone in a world of other humans. Their emotional loyalty is to other humans or some abstract aspect of the empire. At their level the authorities aren't really interested in enforcing strict gender performance so men and women can work together as something like equals.

And yet. Just behind the scrim there are all the gods. Stare too long and one will touch you. This is not normal initiation, which is reserved for a few within most of the great cults. This is something we would read as more shamanic, an encounter that grows into a relationship. The priests would be scandalized.

In this campaign all of the divine mysteries of the Dara Happan pantheon can unfurl themselves outside institutional channels. The characters can build their own kinship societies and be born into new kinds of family structures that better serve what they know now. Maybe this is initiation into 7M and ultimately the goddess, maybe not. Take it where it takes you!

--

One of the things I really liked about the Four Worlds era was the peripheral interest in both the exoteric body of each cult and its esoteric content or "cult secret." The body reflected the god's function in the universe: a wind god, a sun god, whatever. The secret hinted at what that function thinks about . . . how it makes its choices, what matters to it and why. You could give your players these insights after worship or work them into sacred texts. Some cults lent themselves to this more readily than others. Some rarefied cults may actually be the artificially isolated secret powers of more mainstream cults or vestiges of mainstream cults that no longer have material power anywhere.

The Four Worlds era also taught me that Greg never read Max Weber, which is where my typology of "mysticism" is derived. Greg almost always uses the word "mystic" when he means "austerity" or "ascetic" . . . a retreat from the world, a renunciation, a NO. Weber, on the other hand, acknowledged ecstatic states (Molly Bloom YES, kate bush reference) as equally "mystic" where Greg, who still wanted these ecstasies and I think anyone will agree preferred them to the renunciations, would have gone looking for them in "shamanic" or more institutional "theistic" venues.

And so the mystic gets torn up except as a vague signpost of something weird or esoteric or even deliberately anti-logical like a D.T. Suzuki paperback, we just don't know what's going on here and there are no rules. Fine.

The sorcerous or scientific was of course the world Greg was rebelling against, the plastic fantastic clockwork universe Weber called the iron cage of disillusionment, rationalization, disenchantment . . . the empty feeling that there are no worlds left to conquer, we know it all, life will never be thrilling again. A world of nothing higher than humans. "Sorcery" itself refines itself into obsolescence, pushing only the parts that can survive as sciences forward. To me this is the original Lanbril cult, the man against all gods, school of skills and pseudosciences with only a few stolen rune spells to interface with the theistic mainstream. 

But the really interesting things in life are rarely so simple. I think of that solar campaign as a kind of multi-volume Edwardian mega novel like Brideshead Revisited or The Music of Time where you just can't keep the sacred out no matter how much steel you put in its way. Life finds a way.

[mfbrandi]

1 hour ago, scott-martin said:

Weber, on the other hand, acknowledged ecstatic states

A characterisation of mysticism I read in a history of Sufism decades ago — I don’t remember who wrote it and this won’t be verbatim — has always stuck with me:

• Mysticism is the idea that union with god must be achieved in this world.

No other life. No other world. Mysticism as religion without the ontological baggage.

[Eff]

Now when it comes to the collision of magical forms, we do have four, or 3(+1) at a bare minimum, and so the minimal interactions do end up with at least three to deal with- sorcery as the Other of the "pagan" worldview, the vile Enlightenment marching from the sunset world, must either squeeze out the differences between the shamanic and theurgic approaches, or annihilate one of them altogether, unless we end up in a spiraling set of death struggles. And all that without considering mysticism, or dividing or combining any of these approaches. 

So there is, for me, the need to, having acknowledged the Arkati's eyes and what they saw, politely damn them and let the four or five triangles separate briefly before they squeeze down into two colliding. Besides, aesthetically, I feel Nabokov's brief moment of light and warmth between two infinities of darkness is vulnerable to vanishing if we let eternal struggles grow too potent, whether we end up in a bleak Wasteworld or, worse, in a banal one where are struggles are reframed as existence against non-existence. 

But I've been reading the 1990 Pendragon again.

[scott-martin]

7 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

A characterisation of mysticism I read in a history of Sufism decades ago

Love it. In their honour maybe we can deploy an overlay to the Four Worlds model and call it something like "generous/grudging" or "intoxicated/sober" . . . 

Theism (generous) is open to near-universal initiation and continuous participation in the sacred. We see this often in wealthy theyalan communities and rarely elsewhere.
Theism (grudging) closes down direct initiatory channels in favor of vicarious observation: religious experts ("priests") perform the rituals and the rest of us are lucky to get to watch. In Glorantha this is rarely satisfying. Note that trad rural Orlanth can go here alongside all Dara Happan proles.

Humanism (generous) revels in the revelation that there is no god but man. We see this in my goofball readings of hrestolic adventurism and intoxicated lanbrism but practically nowhere else.
Humanism (grudging) conflates all the worst aspects of a secular universe and fake religion to serve the bureaucratic elites. MGF when used satirically, see also "mostal."

Animism (generous) looks a lot like new age woo woo and that's okay, it's only a game. We're all having shamanic encounters here. 
Animism (grudging) concentrates real religious experience in the person of the shaman, leaving the rest of us once again out in the cold. In the worst scenarios this is then institutionalized, creating ompalam style oppression of the human in favor of the "god."

Mysticism (generous) is a state of mind that embraces just about any of the working methods in use elsewhere. Largely absent from the Four Worlds model, which means adepts can be ubiquitous because nobody is looking for them.
Mysticism (grudging) is where you get siddhis in exchange for austerities. Using the siddhi wrecks your austerity, so this becomes another satirical aspect of the game experience.

Situating the Red Goddess in this three-dimensional matrix can be interesting. 

 

[Nick Brooke]

There are four triangles, but they make a D4, a tetrahedron. The base of the tetrahedron is mundanity, mortality, dross. The apex is mystical. The three magical forms/worlds/approaches each connect with mundanity at their base, with mysticism at their common vertex, and with each other at every level. There may be a pole up the middle, as it were, connecting mundanity to mysticism without impinging on any of the three worlds, but it’s probably very greasy.

[Nick Brooke]

If you step on it, it hurts.

[metcalph]

57 minutes ago, Nick Brooke said:

If you step on it, it hurts.

The Four Worlds theorem is bunkum.  Lego is the only true path to understanding. 

[Nick Brooke]

To live is to suffer.

[Jens]

19 minutes ago, Nick Brooke said:

To live is to suffer.

"Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something."

[Nick Brooke]

Artist’s impression of the Gloranthan Cosmos as Tetrahedron:

More soon.

[soltakss]

14 hours ago, Nick Brooke said:

There are four triangles, but they make a D4, a tetrahedron. The base of the tetrahedron is mundanity, mortality, dross. The apex is mystical. The three magical forms/worlds/approaches each connect with mundanity at their base, with mysticism at their common vertex, and with each other at every level. There may be a pole up the middle, as it were, connecting mundanity to mysticism without impinging on any of the three worlds, but it’s probably very greasy.

The three visible faces are Malkion, Hrestol, and the Red Goddess, who completes them. I am not sure whose face should be on the hidden face, or base, of the pyramid.

[mfbrandi]

1 hour ago, soltakss said:

I am not sure whose face should be on the hidden face, or base, of the pyramid.

The flip answer would be an invisible god …

If the base is the mundane world, each of us is a point on it. Mystical consciousness is the diffusion of one’s mind across the whole of the base. There’s your union with the “invisible” god, pantheistically conceived.

That is our base, and — poof! — we dispense with the superstructure as mere metaphysics. The apex winks out taking three faces with it.

IIRC — old leaky brains — Hero Wars mysticism was a this-world magic.

[soltakss]

1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

The flip answer would be an invisible god …

Of course! So obvious!

Thanks. Sometimes flip answers are the best ones.

[Joerg]

10 hours ago, soltakss said:

The three visible faces are Malkion, Hrestol, and the Red Goddess, who completes them. I am not sure whose face should be on the hidden face, or base, of the pyramid.

Arkat?

[None]

On 10/8/2024 at 6:28 PM, davecake said:

But this could all, of course, be Plentonius trying to edit Dara Happan myth to show that all the disparate things that form the official mythology of the Dara Happan Empire of Khordavu always have been part of the Glorious solar Empire since the time of Yelm, even if the evidence is a bit flimsy, and there certainly is no real evidence that the Starseers of his time (whose magic was learnt from foreign wandering atheist astronomers in the Darkness) had anything to do with the earlier Buserian cult. But it would be awkward for anyone to say to.

I think I'm leaning towards this. At most it seem likely that there could have been a smaller cult similar to the Buserian cult that that that merged with or transformed into the Buserian cult as he was adopted into the Solar pantheon.