Heroquesting & God-learners

[jajagappa]

Another new FB post from Jeff.

JR>There's a lot here to unpack. Worth a very careful read!

HISTORY OF HEROQUESTING

Heroquesting begins with Time, and the division of the Mundane World from the Gods World. In the God Time, there was no division between the worlds of men and gods, between Life and Death, or body and spirit. The events and deeds of the God Time made the cosmos and established its patterns. The Gods War introduced the power of Death, which separated all with violence, death, and entropy. Reality was fractured. The eternal gods would have ceased to exist but for the Cosmic Compromise, whereby the gods voluntarily abdicated their free will within the temporal world rather than lose all into the maws of nonexistence. The gods remained eternal at the cost of being limited to their God Time patterns. Heroquesting is the means by which mortals can interact with the events of the God Time.

During the First Age, such men and women could fulfill their potential only with the established cults. A considerable amount of cult secret activity is devoted towards defining their god's place in the mythic geography and exploring nearby events and neighbors. Associated cults often share events and unimportant secrets, with each other, but in general every religion kept its experiences on the Hero Plane to themselves. Only a few Brithini claimed to know everything, and to record it in Zzabur's Blue Book, whose original is long lost beneath the Neliomi Sea. The few real fragments of this book found have proved alarmingly accurate. Most people are glad the rest is lost.

Arkat Chaosbane was the first individual to discover heroquesting outside of a specific cult myth. He underwent several secret initiations (and excommunications) which gave him an unusual transcultural view of the secret world of myth. His personal experiences gave him clues which he followed, exploited, and taught to others. He finally established a cult which preserved the secrets of heroquesting.

Arkat's heir, the Dark Empire, was a widespread, loosely organized body of city states, families, priesthoods, and special interest groups. Upon his apotheosis in (c. 500) the benefits and problems were divided among loyal lieutenants of the great, solitary hero.

The activities of the Dark Empire qualified its adherents as a Malkioni heretics. A holy war destroyed the cult of Arkat, driving its followers underground. Though the Arkat people attempted to destroy all their records in the Great Fire of Clarity (c. 715), much of their knowledge and Heroquesting techniques passed into the hands of the God Learners.

The God Learners systematically explored the spirit plane, at the same time exploiting it without regard to its consciousness or purpose. In the centuries of their rule, they made substantial changes, even to the dreams of nations. At the time of their demise a poet wrote:

"Too late, too late/

to save the dreams/

all lost forever down the Great Sink."

During most of the Third Age heroquesting was considered evil, because the God Learners were so enthusiastic about it. Cults purged themselves of unusual rites, denounced certain knowledge, and destroyed records. A general religious conservatism resulted in a stunted understanding of the religious experiences offered by each deity.

Only the Lunar Empire actively pursued the subject. The Pelorian mystical geography was almost virgin territory since the area was never actively part of the God Learner's mythic synthesis. The Red Goddess, an immortal orphan resurrected by ambitious mystics, opened her own way into the spirit world. The Lunar pantheon is largely made up of mortals who obtained divine status and replaced the Old Gods. The Lunar philosophy urges each person to seek their own heroquest, and the highlights of their history are lit by individuals who combined material and spiritual success.

The processes of the Lunar Way seemed to contradict the Great Compromise, and in response the ancient gods of nature and time inspired many of their number to rebel against their hidebound cult authorities, and heroquest thoroughly, arming themselves to challenge the Red Goddess. The resultant battle of Castle Blue in 1246 resulted in the acceptance of the Red Goddess into the world as a deity. It was like an amendment to the Great Compromise.

From then on, the forces of the Red Goddess expanded, always grating upon the anti-chaos sensitivities of the rest of the gods. Although the gods had been beaten into resignation, many humans did not accept the Red Goddess as natural. They felt cheated by the outcome and consciously sought to arm themselves as fully as possible for another fight rather than being summoned, almost unprepared, as they were before. They have been preparing Heroes.

Now, in the last years of the Third Age, the social and religious fabric of society is dissolving. Bold individuals are carving niches for themselves, some in this world and some in the spirit world, and some in both. They are learning to be Heroes.

Cosmic tensions have recently been exacerbated by the actions of the Red Goddess: she has gotten so close to destroying Orlanth that the very fabric of the universe is threatened.

Prophets have predicted everywhere that a great spiritual battle is soon to take place, and that it will be preceded by many skirmishes. This time everyone is ready: the Hero Wars have begun.

 

JR>A little more on the God Learners and Heroquesting:

A heroquest is a direct interaction with the divine realm of myth and archetypes. In a heroquest, you interact and experience the divine realm and bring back magic, be it Rune spells, guardian spirits, good harvest, a terrible curse, something long forgotten and hidden, etc.

As we interact with the kaleidoscopic divine realm, we of course change its arrangement. Like walking into a room of swirling smoke, our presence causes the mist to swirl around us, changing its direction and patterns. Most of the time we have little control of the changes - we enter the room, the smoke swirls because of our mere presence.

Like rationalists are even inclined to, the God Learners made the leap from conceptualizing how this all works together into the hubristic belief that they could control everything and reshape reality according to their will and intellect.

 

JR> That second paragraph is the key to many mysteries.

JR> The funhouse mirror of heroquesting, with its swirling smoke and kaleidoscopic archetypes puts me in the mind of Funhouse.

 

JR>This little snippet is in the Glorantha Sourcebook, and is an incredibly important tidbit. Even if the God Learners are now gone and cursed, the Mythical Synthesis Movement has already done its work. In a sense, we are all God Learners now.

---------

The God Learners evolved the Mythical Synthesis Movement, an attempt to identify and define the gods, spirits, and other powers of the world, and arrange them into a coherent and knowable unity. By doing this, the God Learners sought to reconstruct and impose their will upon the mythical realities of the God Time. In the process, they discovered that many religions contained remarkably similar myths and gods, even though the cultures had never met and were separated by oceans, mountains and languages. The Mythical Synthesis Movement proved to be very popular in the regions of direct Jrusteli influence and eventually gained recognition (if not acceptance) in most civilized parts of the world.

The God Learners grouped deities into artificial pantheons arranged around the various elemental Runes. These formalized arrangements are the product of scholars, poets, and philosophers, and often fly in the face of actual religious practice and experience. They nonetheless exercised tremendous influence upon the compilation of myths in Glorantha and upon the understanding of Gloranthan deities in the Hero Wars period.

 

[EricW]

There is an interesting parallel to the real world. The more you know the location of something, the less you know about where it is heading. God learners sought to create a comprehensive map of all creation, but even the God Time isn't perfectly static. Their map was wrong before they finished it. Using their map as a guide instead of their hearts led to subtly flawed heroquest outcomes. The defects got worse over time, until something snapped.

Edited June 30, 2021 by EricW

[Baron Wulfraed]

Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle...

 

[Akhôrahil]

”During most of the Third Age heroquesting was considered evil, because the God Learners were so enthusiastic about it.”

Presumably this only applies to experimental or exploratory heroquesting, not the regular kinds done at Sacred Time? 

[jajagappa]

3 hours ago, Akhôrahil said:

Presumably this only applies to experimental or exploratory heroquesting, not the regular kinds done at Sacred Time? 

I don't think most Gloranthans would think of their Sacred Time or seasonal holy days as heroquests.  No more than we would commonly think of our 12 days of Christmas or Easter rituals (or other relevant rituals) as heroquests.

[soltakss]

On 7/1/2021 at 7:01 PM, jajagappa said:

I don't think most Gloranthans would think of their Sacred Time or seasonal holy days as heroquests.  No more than we would commonly think of our 12 days of Christmas or Easter rituals (or other relevant rituals) as heroquests.

Of course, they consider these as Holy Day Re-enactments.

They are, however, HeroQuests and others can interact with them as HeroQuests.

[Ali the Helering]

On 7/1/2021 at 7:01 PM, jajagappa said:

I don't think most Gloranthans would think of their Sacred Time or seasonal holy days as heroquests.  No more than we would commonly think of our 12 days of Christmas or Easter rituals (or other relevant rituals) as heroquests.

Hmmm... whilst true, you put me in mind of an occasion I was talking to Tindalos, and told him I was returning from the primary Christian Heroquest.  He promptly replied "So you've been presiding at Communion?"

Sussed.

[Joerg]

58 minutes ago, Ali the Helering said:

Hmmm... whilst true, you put me in mind of an occasion I was talking to Tindalos, and told him I was returning from the primary Christian Heroquest.  He promptly replied "So you've been presiding at Communion?"

Sussed.

Looks like your martyrdom is still ongoing.

 

Living is a universe-reaffirming task in Glorantha all by itself. Undergoing the necessary tasks of in- and exhaling, eating and drinking, ablutions, sleeping, and culturally demanded tasks like dressing, bathing or changing clothes creates the magic that carries the world onward through Time.

Ascetically refusing to participate in such activities (at least tuning these activities down a lot) is the path of the mystic who separates herself from the snares of the world. Which becomes a different kind of magical pursuit (through inactivity).

 

To bring back the subject: a certain notorious branch of the God Learners did use imitation of common religious rituals to force their way into the myths behind the rites addressed by the congregations, at first in secret, later forcing those congregations to support their interactions. And possibly that wasn't that different to them from using congregations of Malkioni sending magical energies to the Invisible God with significant amounts of that energy available to the officiating wizards, which appears to be what God Learner orthodox Malkionism was about.

Edited July 3, 2021 by Joerg

[Nevermet]

I really wish I had more to say or comment, since this is Important Stuff (tm)