Glorantha’s Founding Myth and the Nature of Religion

[Joerg]

14 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

So back in 2007, it seems to have been hemi-demi-semi-quasi-official that Chaos is the Void and that that tentacle trying to strangle you is not itself an incursion from the other side but the phenomenal world having a very bad reaction to finding out that there is Nothing behind the curtain.

It is Chaos when in contact with reality(Creation. Or it lends its potential to the manipulations of a mystic shielded by (an instance of) the Abslolute. (Most Lunar illuminates aren't shielded that way IMG.)

[mfbrandi]

On 10/7/2022 at 12:31 PM, Joerg said:

Voi Law...

@Joerg: I think you might like this from Plato’s Timaeus:

Quote

Wanting everything to be good and nothing bad, to the degree that this is possible, the god took hold of as much of the All as was visible and not still but moving inharmoniously and disorderly, and he brought it into order from disorder, judging the former altogether better than the latter.

I got that plowing through Carolina López-Ruiz’s Gods, Heroes, and Monsters, which also has this on Nysalor related (or parallel) cosmogonies:

Quote

Phoenician cosmogonies seem to have shared basic concepts with Orphic ones, most remarkably the idea of a cosmic egg but also the mention of Time (here as Aion, “eternal time”) and Protogonos, “First Born.” The latter was the name some Orphic cosmogonies gave to Phanes (“The Shining One”), a divinity said to be born from the cosmic egg, which in turn was made by Time (Chronos — not to be confused with Kronos).

Heaven, Earth, Kronos, Zeus (i.e. Orlanth), and Dionysos all come after Time and Phanes (i.e. Rashoran/Nysalor) in the Orphic cosmic succession. Another piece of the puzzle.

[mfbrandi]

5 hours ago, Joerg said:

a mystic shielded by (an instance of) the Absolute

No, you’ve got me there. No idea. I’d have guessed that the absolute was what the mystic experienced union with (e.g. Chaos, YGWV), not what protected the mystic from their practice.

Still, where can I buy one? The local off-licence?

[Ormi Phengaria]

23 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

I know you don’t suggest we drop it, but would it be that easy to drop, anyway? The illuminated hero or aspirant deity seems key to the setting, and isn’t illumination all about touching Chaos conceived of as the Void? Isn’t that why Nysalor has the Chaos rune?

That is probably not why Nysalor has the Chaos rune, no. The "Nature of the Cult/Reason for Continued Existence," "The Dark Side" and "Arkat the Destroyer" entries in Nysalor/Gbaji's CoT writeup, read in succession, are particularly pertinent to addressing that question, in my opinion.

  

23 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

So back in 2007, it seems to have been hemi-demi-semi-quasi-official that Chaos is the Void and that that tentacle trying to strangle you is not itself an incursion from the other side but the phenomenal world having a very bad reaction to finding out that there is Nothing behind the curtain.

Very important distinction: the Void is not identical to Nothing. It isn't absence or loss. It is less than nothing.

Edited October 9, 2022 by Ormi Phengaria

[mfbrandi]

16 minutes ago, Ormi Phengaria said:

That is probably not why Nysalor has the Chaos rune, no. The "Nature of the Cult/Reason for Continued Existence," "The Dark Side" and "Arkat the Destroyer" entries in Nysalor/Gbaji's CoT writeup, read in succession, are particularly pertinent to addressing that question, in my opinion.

From The Dark Side (CoT, p. 89):

Quote

[L]aw and chaos create in different ways, and all creativity rests upon cooperation between elements of existence. He who operates solely from personal desire will not cooperate, since the childish core of any being’s personality knows no constraint … fully lawful beings can be as much agents of the dark side as was the worst Gbaji prophet.

So selfishness — failure to cooperate — leads to failure of creativity and to (or is) the dark side, but that is explicitly not a chaotic feature (if you will excuse the expression). Chaos creates, and according to this line of thinking that means chaos admits of cooperation.

The cult exists because we will always ask questions; some of the “answers” we might get could tempt us (through a false parallel) to the dark side, which isn’t a chaos thing; Arkati are uptight about chaos and the dark side, which are not the same thing.

So what insight does this give us into why Nysalor has the chaos rune (as opposed to why illuminates might be self-absorbed arseholes)? If I figure it out, will I have to cross my fingers next Sacred Time?

[Ormi Phengaria]

3 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

No, you’ve got me there. No idea. I’d have guessed that the absolute was what the mystic experienced union with (e.g. Chaos, YGWV), not what protected the mystic from their practice.

Still, where can I buy one? The local off-licence?

  

6 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

So what insight does this give us into why Nysalor has the chaos rune (as opposed to why illuminates might be self-absorbed arseholes)? If I figure it out, will I have to cross my fingers next Sacred Time?

Orthodox mystic ways seem to be about cultivating a direct connection to the Transcendent. This is astonishingly difficult to achieve; one must mentally abjure all division, all causation, all presence and all absence while nonetheless one's own mind remains entangled in such things. This is why austere practices can foster such a connection. This recognition allows the Void to be approached as and understood for what it is, rather than as Glorantha's "opposite."

Illumination is different. Illumination is recognition of the union of opposites. At its most fundamental, this means a recognition of the truth that Chaos is not ultimately inimical to Glorantha. But—crucially!—Chaos it remains. Oblivion it remains! This can be a profoundly disturbing realization to have thrust upon you, and the realization itself does not necessarily equip you to integrate it into more prosaic parts of your existence. Most so afflicted turn to the Shadow of Illumination, become "Occluded", and will give themselves to Chaos.

Edited October 9, 2022 by Ormi Phengaria

[mfbrandi]

18 minutes ago, Ormi Phengaria said:

Chaos it remains. Oblivion it remains!

So Chaos is Nirvana, after all?

20 minutes ago, Ormi Phengaria said:

This can be a profoundly disturbing realization to have thrust upon you, and the realization itself does not necessarily equip you to integrate it into more prosaic parts of your existence. Most so afflicted turn to the Shadow of Illumination, become "Occluded", and will give themselves to Chaos.

Words like “shadow” and “occluded” make it sound like we are talking about the dark side, again, but that is explicitly not a Chaos thing (in the indicated passages of Cults of Terror, anyway).

Neither does contact with Chaos/Nirvana/whatever sending you off your trolley sound like what is meant by drawing a false parallel to excuse one’s uncooperative behaviour (i.e. there isn’t really a sound argument justifying dark side behaviour in the insights of illumination, but temptations don’t need to rest on good arguments). And surely plenty of other things than illumination will lead to one making such excuses and behaving badly, no?

[Ormi Phengaria]

1 minute ago, mfbrandi said:

So Chaos is Nirvana, after all?

Buddhism doesn't equate nirvana with oblivion. That's been nearly universally held for thousands of years.

3 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

Words like “shadow” and “occluded” make it sound like we are talking about the dark side, again, but that is explicitly not a Chaos thing (in the indicated passages of Cults of Terror, anyway).

In essence, it isn't Chaotic. But widespread Illumination, by itself, will inevitably lead to Chaos. Widespread Illumination is possible whenever the fundamental coherence of the cosmos is probed, whenever worldviews begin collapsing with nothing ready to replace them, spreading as some variety of sickness. That is what Nysalor represents, and the outcome being what it is is why Gbaji is the most subtle form of Chaos.

The creative power of oblivion remains destructive. In taking away, something new is formed: a vessel is useful for its empty space. Time is lived and experienced in the empty spaces, too. But that doesn't make Chaos a generative force in itself. By itself, it will make Everything into Nothing. Gbaji says this is fine, because there's no difference between the drinking cup, the emptiness of your heart, and the annihilation of the world. It's fine, because in the end all of these things are the same.

[Eff]

On 10/8/2022 at 4:28 PM, mfbrandi said:

I know you don’t suggest we drop it, but would it be that easy to drop, anyway? The illuminated hero or aspirant deity seems key to the setting, and isn’t illumination all about touching Chaos conceived of as the Void? Isn’t that why Nysalor has the Chaos rune?

Dipping a bucket into the Well of Daliath, I came up with this from that Stafford guy on the taint of Chaos:

So back in 2007, it seems to have been hemi-demi-semi-quasi-official that Chaos is the Void and that that tentacle trying to strangle you is not itself an incursion from the other side but the phenomenal world having a very bad reaction to finding out that there is Nothing behind the curtain.

Now maybe IRL the headlong rush toward Nirvana is dangerous, but haven’t the rabidly anti-Chaos factions in Glorantha — characters in a fiction, remember — always seemed rather comical to you? Someone was sending them up.
 

I mean, yes, Storm Bulls exist to be mocked and have been for quite some time. However, I think that that 2007 text is very problematical in that if you take it seriously, that Chaos manifests in Chaos critters as an ineffable lack or void that cannot be explicitly identified, but is intangible- well, then you'd start drawing some parallels to how this line of rhetoric is applied in the real world, and start asking some very hard questions about why "the world" singles out particular people or beings for its hatred and attempts to torment them.

But that's very firmly and clearly a dead end, because the tangle of Chaos does not allow you to achieve anything fruitful from it, not even a mean-spirited parody of Gnosticism. So you must cut the Gordian knot in order to make something coherent, and at that point you might as well cut in different places and make something more humane.

Now with that being said, mystical enlightenment does not, in the real world, always mean touching a void, and even in Glorantha this is not clearly the case. For example, draconic mystics are easy to interpret as attempting reunification with a broader world-soul (and the EWF would be running a chintzy attempt at hastening Teilhard de Chardin's Omega Point). Many other mystics might well be seeking something more like a pleroma, a tumescent fullness rather than a welcoming gap.

But setting that aside, I think that if we ignore the direct text and look at the subtext, the problem with any grand effort to render Chaos a real cosmic threat of oblivion is that no culture in the setting attempts to do anything about Chaos overall. They drive noisome Chaotic critters away, Praxians go a step further and valorize Chaos critters as a foe to prove one's full masculinity, but the Storm Bulls who hang out near the Queendom of Jab are not attempting to marshal a campaign of extermination. They're interested in containing scorpionfolk raids and attacks. People's words are that Chaos is an implacable and inimical foe, but their actions with regards to Chaos are, in practice, "live and let live", "there won't be nothing if you don't start it", etc.

And in this light, the Lunar "error" is not in that they have a fundamentally wrong view of Chaos, it's that they admit out loud what other people mumble. Chaos can be lived with and accommodated. Which in turn suggests that perhaps the text and subtext are at odds with one another, but there may well be a way to reconcile them.

(Or else we could toss that aside and rededicate ourselves to the insistence that a dozen goatmen shivering in a cave somewhere are chewing holes in reality with every breath, but that the only credible response to this is to leave them alone unless they're being a nuisance for other reasons.)

[mfbrandi]

7 hours ago, Eff said:

I think that that 2007 text is very problematical in that if you take it seriously, that Chaos manifests in Chaos critters as an ineffable lack or void that cannot be explicitly identified, but is intangible- well, then you'd start drawing some parallels to how this line of rhetoric is applied in the real world, and start asking some very hard questions about why "the world" singles out particular people or beings for its hatred and attempts to torment them.

But if what we don’t like is the idea that a creature’s having something of the void about them is a justification for stringing them up from the nearest lamppost, then why not just say that a chaos taint provides no such justification?

(IRL, we cannot always respond to “lynch a because they have property F” with “¬Fa”, because sometimes a really is F, so we have to say that Fa is not a good reason to lynch a, no?)

Personally, I’d ditch the idea that we can just say of any evil or grotesque behaviour that it is chaotic. Sure, there will be characters that say it, but up here in meta-land, we don’t have to believe it.

And, yes, I suspect Stafford wanted it both ways, but I didn’t know the man and cannot absolutely rule out that he was teasing us.

[mfbrandi]

11 hours ago, Ormi Phengaria said:

In essence, it isn't Chaotic. But widespread Illumination, by itself, will inevitably lead to Chaos.

See, I read it as illumination does not justify dark side behaviour, as it is explicit that one gets from “there is no fundamental difference between law and chaos” to “I can do what the hell I like and screw you” via a false parallel.

But if non-cooperation/non-creativity (the dark side) is explicitly not to be identified with Chaos, then even if we buy illumination + human nature - new improved cult brand X supervigilance = dark side, where does the slide to Chaos come into it?

As for nirvana, I am only playing on such as “‘blown out’, as in an oil lamp” and “deprived of fuel, the fire goes out, and this is nirvana”, where it is is characterised in terms of an absence. I don’t pretend to be bringing insights into Buddhism.

[mfbrandi]

14 hours ago, Eff said:

a dozen goatmen shivering in a cave somewhere are chewing holes in reality with every breath

For the avoidance of doubt, I like the idea of Chaos as the Void, but I do not see the Void as morally charged — not negatively and not positively. It does not justify chopping our furry friends into kebabs.

I am now going out to start the Church of the Twelve Hornèd Ones and to teach you all to chew holes in reality just by breathing. Who could not?

Edited October 10, 2022 by mfbrandi
diacritic

[Ormi Phengaria]

7 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

See, I read it as illumination does not justify dark side behaviour, as it is explicit that one gets from “there is no fundamental difference between law and chaos” to “I can do what the hell I like and screw you” via a false parallel.

But if non-cooperation/non-creativity (the dark side) is explicitly not to be identified with Chaos, then even if we buy illumination + human nature - new improved cult brand X supervigilance = dark side, where does the slide to Chaos come into it?

Illumination doesn't justify anything. It's pure insight, no prescription. You are now free, and have to figure out what that means on your own. And that false parallel is where most people will end up without some form of guidance: salving existential anxiety by substituting their personal, individual evaluations for the lost Absolute. A kind of brute egoism we might identify with the Disorder rune.

Strange people violate your cult proscriptions and nothing comes of it. You try to fight back against this decay of the universe, but their magic seemingly proves them right. You start to feel the existential anxiety too. And even then, maybe with most people it just leads to self-destructive behaviour; with a bit of agitation and organization, maybe a populist consciousness, your Want Mores and Make Me a Dukes.

Good things can result! This can be authentically liberating in every possible sense. The shackles are broken, the tyrant is slain, the arbitrary whims called law are abolished, the abuses suffered cease. And Nysalor will smile now, saying "this too shall pass." Illumination doesn't tell you to stop, it doesn't let you know that this accomplished world of harmony and golden light is worth more than what you get for it. You'll keep going. The destruction you wrought previously is not integrated into the universe; it has proven to exist for its own sake. It is Chaos.

Western philosophy has a funny pejorative term for all of this in "nihilism". "Nihilism" is the pessimistic self-negation, which comes of the death of God, that says absent higher existential meaning, suicide is the only justifiable course. "Nihilism" is also in the existentialist response to this which says that meaning comes from your willful action, either with a minimal leap of faith back to God, or a more maximal, Nietzschean embrace of "nihilism's" liberating destruction. Likewise, the West didn't stop, didn't find its collective amor fati or some other line of flight, and the philosophers identified "nihilism" in what came after too.

 

[mfbrandi]

1 hour ago, Ormi Phengaria said:

You are now free, and have to figure out what that means on your own.

You have always been free, and it doesn’t “mean” anything.

1 hour ago, Ormi Phengaria said:

salving existential anxiety by substituting their personal, individual evaluations for the lost Absolute

Is this anxiety at the death of god? She was never there to lose. Why be anxious?

I still don’t see what this has to do with Chaos, but I am a dim cove.

Anyway, if we carry on talking past each other, I will bore you even more than I have already, so I will stop. Thanks for playing, and have a great week!

[Squaredeal Sten]

I disagree with the proposition that Chaos and Illumination are equivalent in Glorantha.  (And have no reason to believe in either iof them in the Real World, except for small-c chaos as a mathematical concept.)

I am pretty sure that the broos and scorpion men are not generally  illuminated.  If that is so then the proposition is disproved as a general rule.  

There is an intersection  between the two, but there is also an intersection between illuminates  and characters with affiliation with  many or all of the other runes.

To me illumination means the character has realized it's only a game.  Which most of the players already know, though many of us can think of individuals who seem to have lost track of that.

 

 

 

 

 

[Ormi Phengaria]

20 hours ago, Eff said:

I mean, yes, Storm Bulls exist to be mocked and have been for quite some time. However, I think that that 2007 text is very problematical in that if you take it seriously, that Chaos manifests in Chaos critters as an ineffable lack or void that cannot be explicitly identified, but is intangible- well, then you'd start drawing some parallels to how this line of rhetoric is applied in the real world, and start asking some very hard questions about why "the world" singles out particular people or beings for its hatred and attempts to torment them.

But that's very firmly and clearly a dead end, because the tangle of Chaos does not allow you to achieve anything fruitful from it, not even a mean-spirited parody of Gnosticism.

Suffice to say, I don't think it's a dead end! I think this is the most productive avenue for interpreting Chaos-as-antagonist. And this will bring us slightly back into the original topic.

Here's my key: every conflict of the Gods War was Chaotic. Chaos was the death and devastation the gods and their followers invited upon themselves by refusing to understand the Other as anything but an existential threat or the ruin of their perfection. Chaos is the rejection of change. All change is oblivion, because all changes result in the loss of what was prior, however small or subtle. Only by establishing continuity with what came before, by making meaning, by transforming this Chaos into observable and eternal patterns, does it become not-oblivion.

Broos are Chaotic down to the hollow cores of their being. They are willful in their pursuit of abuse, violence, and atrocity. But they are also blameless—literally. Broos are Chaotic because Theyalans refuse to face up to the social issues of traumatic stress, rape, and in-group sexuality. They refuse to form an integrated understanding of these things. They write off Ragnaglar as mad and blame Thed for the sexual abuses she suffered. When these terrible things happen again, they wail and agonize about how there's simply nothing to be done. Through this deflection and projection, they create Broos.

[Eff]

2 minutes ago, Ormi Phengaria said:

Suffice to say, I don't think it's a dead end! I think this is the most productive avenue for interpreting Chaos-as-antagonist. And this will bring us slightly back into the original topic.

Here's my key: every conflict of the Gods War was Chaotic. Chaos was the death and devastation the gods and their followers invited upon themselves by refusing to understand the Other as anything but an existential threat or the ruin of their perfection. Chaos is the rejection of change. All change is oblivion, because all changes result in the loss of what was prior, however small or subtle. Only by establishing continuity with what came before, by making meaning, by transforming this Chaos into observable and eternal patterns, does it become not-oblivion.

Broos are Chaotic down to the hollow cores of their being. They are willful in their pursuit of abuse, violence, and atrocity. But they are also blameless—literally. Broos are Chaotic because Theyalans refuse to face up to the social issues of traumatic stress, rape, and in-group sexuality. They refuse to form an integrated understanding of these things. They write off Ragnaglar as mad and blame Thed for the sexual abuses she suffered. When these terrible things happen again, they wail and agonize about how there's simply nothing to be done. Through this deflection and projection, they create Broos.

I think it is absolutely a dead end, in that in attempting to use it to interpret Chaos as antagonist, you discard the parts I specifically singled out, and indeed, what the text says Chaos is- an absence of physical or psychic substance that draws the revulsion of the world and this revulsion produces the characteristic physical mutations of "Chaos features" in order to encyst the absence or lack. But this absence is not one which can be identified, because there's not a consistent way to declare broo or ogres or scorpionfolk or huan-to or gorp or dragonsnails or bullsitches are each, as a group, lacking in something that real beings have. They exist in continuity with real beings, so if we take this text seriously and in context with the rest of the Gloranthan texts concerning Chaos, we must conclude that the absence or lack is unknowable and undefinable.

And indeed, your answer goes into another direction- Chaos as external projection of subjective social tensions. A perfectly adequate response when it comes to gregarious Chaos critters, though I struggle to imagine what social tension Hungry Jack represents. I think it's a direction that falls apart even further when you consider the whole fountain of Chaotic substance in the depths of the Underworld, though, because clearly Chaos is not a totally sociologically generated phenomenon in the text. And then of course if Chaos is "rejection of change", what exactly does the Lunar position on Chaos signify, apart from another way to deflect the Lunars into an unchallenging opponent?

[Ormi Phengaria]

1 hour ago, Eff said:

But this absence is not one which can be identified, because there's not a consistent way to declare broo or ogres or scorpionfolk or huan-to or gorp or dragonsnails or bullsitches are each, as a group, lacking in something that real beings have. They exist in continuity with real beings, so if we take this text seriously and in context with the rest of the Gloranthan texts concerning Chaos, we must conclude that the absence or lack is unknowable and undefinable.

The text says a lot of things which are plainly contradictory and inconsistent. At first, I took this to be a demonstration of interpretive freedom, or, as I read you here, a sign of papering over thematic incoherence. I started taking Glorantha more seriously when I noticed that these many inconsistencies were inconsistent in a consistent manner, both internally to sources and comparatively between them.

The perspective and voice of Chaos in the text is vanishingly rare outside of Lunar writings. Broos are the closet thing, and we're still stuck reading between the lines of etic accounts. Everyone is pointing at and talking about something called Chaos, but where we look where the lines cross, there's nothing there. The only constant is that they are pointing away from themselves and their worlds and norms.

1 hour ago, Eff said:

And indeed, your answer goes into another direction- Chaos as external projection of subjective social tensions. A perfectly adequate response when it comes to gregarious Chaos critters, though I struggle to imagine what social tension Hungry Jack represents. I think it's a direction that falls apart even further when you consider the whole fountain of Chaotic substance in the depths of the Underworld, though, because clearly Chaos is not a totally sociologically generated phenomenon in the text.

Chaos is not limited to subjective social tensions, even if at the very least this could be reasonably argued to link Broos, Ogres, and Huan-To, and certainly cults like Gark, Ikadz, Krjalk, Ompalam, and Thanatar. How about the Devil's Marsh? Waha transforms the River into a carrier of spiritual pollution, and rejects her as shameful. The Riverfolk reject Waha, and reject his Canal. The Canal tries to reject herself by burying under the Earth, only for the Earth to reject her a final time. She surfaces to become the Marsh. Supposedly, the Canal disintegrates the Devil, but the Chaos this creates is an inexorable part of Waha's cult, as you mentioned. What would happen if it were to succeed? And why does the water so strongly resist flowing under the Block? The waters of the world were the very first to sacrifice themselves in the fight against Chaos. There is unresolved and unspoken conflict at the center of this mystery even as it spawns dragonsnails and gorp.

1 hour ago, Eff said:

And then of course if Chaos is "rejection of change", what exactly does the Lunar position on Chaos signify, apart from another way to deflect the Lunars into an unchallenging opponent?

It means healing that cosmic wound, of course. Turning Chaos into not-oblivion; integrating it into the world. Whether the Way can succeed at that while the Empire wields oblivion as its favoured weapon remains to be seen, though it does have powerful evidence in its favour!

Edited October 10, 2022 by Ormi Phengaria

[mfbrandi]

15 hours ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

I disagree with the proposition that Chaos and Illumination are equivalent in Glorantha.

That is not my position, of course.

Let’s look back to @scott-martin’s reminding us of the May ’68 slogan, “Beneath the streets, the beach!”

The streets are the phenomenal world where all the aggro is — the cobblestones that make it up are being hurled at the hated CRS.

The beach is the underlying reality, the noumenal world if you will. (Don’t take the Kantian lingo too seriously; this is, as you say, just a game — and a word game, at that.) And my proposal is that beneath phenomena, we find … nothing at all — the Void, which I am identifying with Chaos (which identification met more resistance than I had anticipated).

Tentacle outbreaks — “chaotic features”, gorp/shoggoths, and the rest — are perhaps a symptom of the world’s intolerance of resting on a solid foundation of nothing at all. (See @Eff on H P Lovecraft and the Greg Sez piece.) The tentacles are not an intrusion from the other side (the noumenal), they originate in the phenomenal world — though at its frontier, supposedly — and are themselves phenomena. Or perhaps even this is just a story put about by the more sophisticated of those who fear the squamous and the rugose, and truly phenomena are phenomena are phenomena …

The illuminant has “touched” the Void and has to some degree accepted the truth, but they may not be dealing with it very well: Arkat is super-uptight and acting out in the belief that uptight means right and reasonable; Zorak Zoran has been screaming in pain and fear since before time began, unable any longer to see his own beauty; Humakt, one suspects, never stopped staring into the Void, and you wouldn’t want to look into any of his dead eyes; selfish and self-deceptive people think they have one more excuse to piss inside the shared tent.

So the illuminant’s insight is that when we divide the cosmos into the noumenal (the theorised Other outside of or underlying the known world) and the phenomenal (that which we can detect and interact with — Us, if you like), everything is Us/phenomenal and nothing is Other/noumenal/Chaos. Chaos is the Void, and the Void — of course — is not anything. This resonates nicely with mysticism’s not being an otherworld magic. There is no higher or lower reality/anti-reality, there is just this world — if you want to experience union with god, you had better do it here and now, because there is no future state. (Think of the mystic as more Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and less superpowered yogi fueled by asceticism.)

So there is no justification for classifying your enemies as Chaos — coming from outside of reality — as reality has no outside. I really hate the idea that we are reality and so good and that they are from outside and so evil, getting at us through the cracks in the world (and that they must be evil because they touched the outside/non-being is hardly an improvement). I hate it with a deep and abiding passion, and this is my game-terms response.

I am not suggesting this as a real-world metaphysics, but as a bit of productive fun for Glorantha. Ultimately, it will fail to make any sense (like Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, perhaps), but it looks like it has implications, and it may suggest playful misuses of other real-world ideas to some — e.g. Godtime as the event horizon of a black hole which is being evaporated via information-destroying Hawking radiation (even the names of gods killed by Kajabor are lost); perhaps this is a Sufi story in Glorantha.

[Eff]

16 hours ago, Ormi Phengaria said:

The text says a lot of things which are plainly contradictory and inconsistent. At first, I took this to be a demonstration of interpretive freedom, or, as I read you here, a sign of papering over thematic incoherence. I started taking Glorantha more seriously when I noticed that these many inconsistencies were inconsistent in a consistent manner, both internally to sources and comparatively between them.

The perspective and voice of Chaos in the text is vanishingly rare outside of Lunar writings. Broos are the closet thing, and we're still stuck reading between the lines of etic accounts. Everyone is pointing at and talking about something called Chaos, but where we look where the lines cross, there's nothing there. The only constant is that they are pointing away from themselves and their worlds and norms.

I don't see it as "papering over thematic incoherence" so much as I see it as the product of unclear and incoherent thinking about Chaos because the signifiers of Chaos across Gloranthan texts point in directions that make it very difficult to cohere Chaos as a concept without ignoring large parts of it to produce a coherent subordinate Chaos. That is, I don't think the incoherence is a deliberate choice. 

And I mean, there's a simple answer to why the perspective and voice of Chaos in Gloranthan texts is vanishingly rare (apart from the "what my parent said" and "what the religious authority told me" for broo and ogres)- Chaotic creatures do not have interiority. That is an answer that is at least consistent with the 2007 text, and it may have been the intent of Stafford all along. But I find it entirely unsatisfactory. 

Quote

Chaos is not limited to subjective social tensions, even if at the very least this could be reasonably argued to link Broos, Ogres, and Huan-To, and certainly cults like Gark, Ikadz, Krjalk, Ompalam, and Thanatar. How about the Devil's Marsh? Waha transforms the River into a carrier of spiritual pollution, and rejects her as shameful. The Riverfolk reject Waha, and reject his Canal. The Canal tries to reject herself by burying under the Earth, only for the Earth to reject her a final time. She surfaces to become the Marsh. Supposedly, the Canal disintegrates the Devil, but the Chaos this creates is an inexorable part of Waha's cult, as you mentioned. What would happen if it were to succeed? And why does the water so strongly resist flowing under the Block? The waters of the world were the very first to sacrifice themselves in the fight against Chaos. There is unresolved and unspoken conflict at the center of this mystery even as it spawns dragonsnails and gorp.

So Chaos is sometimes a product of externalized subjective social tensions, but sometimes it isn't, and is instead a literal and material phenomenon that creates (often divine or spiritual) social tensions. Well, that's a good example of what I'm pointing to- there's no coherence possible with Chaos as the texts portray it. 

 

Quote

It means healing that cosmic wound, of course. Turning Chaos into not-oblivion; integrating it into the world. Whether the Way can succeed at that while the Empire wields oblivion as its favoured weapon remains to be seen, though it does have powerful evidence in its favour!

So the Lunars embrace Chaos by actively seeking to eliminate Chaos, indeed being one of the few groups of people in the setting who actively work towards it? This is a very torturous reading, and it's what I meant by "deflect the Lunars into an unchallenging opponent"- they (in this formulation) don't actually believe that vampires are potentially moral subjects, they believe they can transform vampires into something else which would be a moral subject, and that this will eliminate vampires forever, etc. In other words, the questions the Lunars raise are whether it's better to try and transmogrify people in the hopes of eliminating the problem they represent or to kill them, which I find both unchallenging and frankly unduly biased towards the Lunars. Speaking of course as an unfettered Lunar partisan. 

[Ormi Phengaria]

54 minutes ago, Eff said:

So Chaos is sometimes a product of externalized subjective social tensions, but sometimes it isn't, and is instead a literal and material phenomenon that creates (often divine or spiritual) social tensions. Well, that's a good example of what I'm pointing to- there's no coherence possible with Chaos as the texts portray it. 

To me, they're different manifestations of the same underlying phenomenon, which is conflict as understood through a perspectivist lens (perspectivism being what I tend to use most frequently in my critical readings of the text). It's that deep, unconscious, and complete rejection of the Other which renders something into being Chaotic. And so far, this holds to consistency, as much I can tell.

1 hour ago, Eff said:

So the Lunars embrace Chaos by actively seeking to eliminate Chaos, indeed being one of the few groups of people in the setting who actively work towards it?

You know what? Sure! If we switch gears into a more esoteric, Tantric mode, that's a perfectly acceptable interpretation, but it's no surprise that it's torturous. More exoterically, the Lunar Way conceives of its project in terms of enabling the many different parts of the cosmos to adhere into a harmonious whole, bringing a final end to the Gods War. The main point of contention is that it believes Chaos to be one of those parts, rather than the thing preventing harmony in the first place. In practice, though, they follow a pretty stark dichotomy: Chaos should be shunned or even still eradicated in the same manner of the worst storm bully if it rejects the Way or the Empire, respectively. Chaos becomes acceptable when it becomes Sevened, or under the control of the Sevened. No longer oblivion for its own sake, but oblivion as a tool to manifest the Lunar cosmos. The Way does not see oblivion as being the fundamental nature of Chaos, because the fundamental nature of anything which exists is the unity of We Are All Us. Is that unchallenging? Not in my experience.

[Eff]

27 minutes ago, Ormi Phengaria said:

To me, they're different manifestations of the same underlying phenomenon, which is conflict as understood through a perspectivist lens (perspectivism being what I tend to use most frequently in my critical readings of the text). It's that deep, unconscious, and complete rejection of the Other which renders something into being Chaotic. And so far, this holds to consistency, as much I can tell.

You know what? Sure! If we switch gears into a more esoteric, Tantric mode, that's a perfectly acceptable interpretation, but it's no surprise that it's torturous. More exoterically, the Lunar Way conceives of its project in terms of enabling the many different parts of the cosmos to adhere into a harmonious whole, bringing a final end to the Gods War. The main point of contention is that it believes Chaos to be one of those parts, rather than the thing preventing harmony in the first place. In practice, though, they follow a pretty stark dichotomy: Chaos should be shunned or even still eradicated in the same manner of the worst storm bully if it rejects the Way or the Empire, respectively. Chaos becomes acceptable when it becomes Sevened, or under the control of the Sevened. No longer oblivion for its own sake, but oblivion as a tool to manifest the Lunar cosmos. The Way does not see oblivion as being the fundamental nature of Chaos, because the fundamental nature of anything which exists is the unity of We Are All Us. Is that unchallenging? Not in my experience.

It fails to incorporate the "primordial"/"formless potential" motif, but it also runs into problems when we take a look at how the concept of the Other is used in the existing texts, so that we must say that there are Others and Others, that the identical proper noun refers to two different things without clarification. I think that on this level it works as a literary device- Chaos creatures stand in metaphorically for Otherization run amok. But treating this as a literal phenomenon in the diegesis- well, for one thing, the source text we're discussing indicates that committing rape has a cumulatively increasing chance of turning you into a broo. Does this mean that broo are the consequence of Otherizing rapists and that if Orlanthi hated rapists less, this mutation wouldn't happen? How do we square this with the extent to which the broo exist as a consequence of injustice towards rape survivors, as from most versions of their origin story? 

How do we get from the metaphorical level to the literal level of the text where literal, diegetic actions will diegetically transform you in a literal sense into a literal different category of being? I'm saying "literal" quite a bit because I don't think this approach actually engages with the parts of the text which are difficult to reconcile with perspectivism. Are people born ogres, with unusually sharp teeth, because Gloranthans otherize cannibalism too much, with the exception of Praxians? Would a member of the Cannibal Cult turn into an ogre outside of Prax? On the metaphorical level, ogres are straightforwardly a representation of otherization run wild to the point of believing that anyone outside of yourself could be a secret devil-worshipping cannibal. But on a literal, diegetic level, the relationship being such that xenophobia literally warps reality until otherized individuals grow sharp teeth and get a hankering for long pork starts off asinine and quickly becomes offensive. 

And this is the same problem with your presentation of the Lunars- metaphorically, the basic answer is that the Lunars believe that the Lunar Way allows you to heal the wounds that Chaos represents through incorporating Chaos into the universe rather than rejecting it, thus metaphorically rejecting otherization. But within the diegesis, if Chaos is the wounds of otherization, then if the Lunars diegetically believe in making it part of the harmony of the universe, their solution to otherization is to keep otherizing, and if they diegetically believe in healing those wounds, then they're no longer philosophically pro-Chaos, they're philosophically anti-Chaos. Which involves redefining another textual aspect until it means the opposite of what it appears to say.

Your approach may be self-consistent in its own terms, it certainly is a variation of Glorantha, but it gets there, in my opinion, by discarding aspects of Gloranthan texts. Which is what my point continues to be. 

[mfbrandi]

2 hours ago, Ormi Phengaria said:

the Lunar Way conceives of its project in terms of enabling the many different parts of the cosmos to adhere into a harmonious whole, bringing a final end to the Gods War. The main point of contention is that it believes Chaos to be one of those parts, rather than the thing preventing harmony in the first place.

But the gods were always part of the problem, and Chaos was always part of the solution: the gods are sealed off in the roiling bloody id of godtime; Arachne Solara swallows Chaos (nothing) and spits it out reconstituted as Time (nothing, but on the installment plan)  — time with its arrow pointed at ever increasing entropy and the heat death of the universe. Godtime is hell with the apocalypse running in a tight loop, eternally, with every grudge held tight and burning hot. Time is the realm of mortals, who can accept that everything ends but that maybe not everything will end today. The end of the world tomorrow (or in billions of years’ time) is better than the end of the world all day, every day, forever, right? And that’s the standard Orlanthi view. 😉

[Ormi Phengaria]

2 minutes ago, Eff said:

It fails to incorporate the "primordial"/"formless potential" motif, but it also runs into problems when we take a look at how the concept of the Other is used in the existing texts, so that we must say that there are Others and Others, that the identical proper noun refers to two different things without clarification.

The primordialism is in the drive toward oblivion, and that also remains the source of its creative potential, which I have mentioned before in this thread. Without the Chaosium, all would be unchanging grey stasis, and yet generation from this state is still its destruction, starting from the separation of unity into duality.

With regard to the Other, that was my very conscious choice. Yelm is Absolute, and only at his nadir when the entire world has died and joined him in Hell—the Absolute again—does he confront his Other and integrate it. He does this by the means of Illumination. These concepts don't diverge.

12 minutes ago, Eff said:

Does this mean that broo are the consequence of Otherizing rapists and that if Orlanthi hated rapists less, this mutation wouldn't happen? How do we square this with the extent to which the broo exist as a consequence of injustice towards rape survivors, as from most versions of their origin story? 

I'm trying to be explicit in suggesting that it is not primarily about hatred, bigotry, or social marginalization. These are second-order phenomena. What matters is the extent to which the Orlanthi refuse to approach these things as anything other than individual, inexplicable, and utterly unrelated evil. The extent is total. Rape isn't to be understood as an enduring facet of the patriarchal violence of a warrior culture, but is first and foremost something to be blamed on women who stand outside of the honour-ethos. If that is untenable, then the motivations of the perpetrators of this violence are to be erased by rendering them simply insane. This is a pattern which should stand out as intimately familiar, in my opinion.

29 minutes ago, Eff said:

Are people born ogres, with unusually sharp teeth, because Gloranthans otherize cannibalism too much, with the exception of Praxians? Would a member of the Cannibal Cult turn into an ogre outside of Prax?

They manifest themselves as Ogres after initiation. Ogres are also much, much more than cannibals. The Red Cow Saga would seem to suggest that they are Ragnaglari, and hold to a rapine view of the entire world, including other Ogres, and most definitely the community and culture in which they are born and raised. This is, again, something latent and unexamined in the Orlanthi warrior culture. It's what happens when outwardly directed violent abuse and dispossession comes home. After cutting past all of the social ritual, when strength remains the ultimate justification, you will find the Ragnaglar impulse.

That is, to me, quite different from the way the Cannibal Cult seems to use the Survival Covenant for its way of life and magic. They are deeply disconcerting to other Praxians, who don't pretend to completely understand them, but like the Morokanth, they are integrated.

1 hour ago, Eff said:

On the metaphorical level, ogres are straightforwardly a representation of otherization run wild to the point of believing that anyone outside of yourself could be a secret devil-worshipping cannibal. But on a literal, diegetic level, the relationship being such that xenophobia literally warps reality until otherized individuals grow sharp teeth and get a hankering for long pork starts off asinine and quickly becomes offensive. 

And this is the same problem with your presentation of the Lunars- metaphorically, the basic answer is that the Lunars believe that the Lunar Way allows you to heal the wounds that Chaos represents through incorporating Chaos into the universe rather than rejecting it, thus metaphorically rejecting otherization. But within the diegesis, if Chaos is the wounds of otherization, then if the Lunars diegetically believe in making it part of the harmony of the universe, their solution to otherization is to keep otherizing, and if they diegetically believe in healing those wounds, then they're no longer philosophically pro-Chaos, they're philosophically anti-Chaos. Which involves redefining another textual aspect until it means the opposite of what it appears to say.

Ah. I feel it's important to mention here that the existence of the Other is not reducible to the process of Othering. The condition is usually co-constitutive; Chaos is not particularly suggestive of subaltern nativity. And that may ease some of this Lunar difficulty; the Way seeks to integrate the Other while also keeping it Other. Self and Other exist both as opposites and as a unity within the Ultimate. That, to me, is a nearly perfect encapsulation of Lunar mysticism. It would seem to me that to make the Way selective in the suggested manner, to turn We Are All Us into the conviction that the Other does not or should not exist, would be to flatten it into a worse caricature than even the one where it's straight-forwardly evil and antagonistic.

[Eff]

8 minutes ago, Ormi Phengaria said:

The primordialism is in the drive toward oblivion, and that also remains the source of its creative potential, which I have mentioned before in this thread. Without the Chaosium, all would be unchanging grey stasis, and yet generation from this state is still its destruction, starting from the separation of unity into duality.

With regard to the Other, that was my very conscious choice. Yelm is Absolute, and only at his nadir when the entire world has died and joined him in Hell—the Absolute again—does he confront his Other and integrate it. He does this by the means of Illumination. These concepts don't diverge.

Except that in the text where Yelm confronts his Other, that Other is very specifically named as a number of individuals, only one of whom is Chaotic. So we have to cut that element out of things, or perhaps we have to go to a subjective understanding of Chaos where Orlanth and Kargzant and Shargash were once Chaotic and Other but now are not Other and so not Chaotic. That doesn't appear to be where you are going with this, of course. 

And if Chaos = Other = oblivion, then perhaps the Other does not exist, which is certainly a standard way to understand that construct, but if so, what does "integrating the Other while keeping it Other" mean? What does "integrating oblivion while keeping it oblivion" mean? 

Quote

I'm trying to be explicit in suggesting that it is not primarily about hatred, bigotry, or social marginalization. These are second-order phenomena. What matters is the extent to which the Orlanthi refuse to approach these things as anything other than individual, inexplicable, and utterly unrelated evil. The extent is total. Rape isn't to be understood as an enduring facet of the patriarchal violence of a warrior culture, but is first and foremost something to be blamed on women who stand outside of the honour-ethos. If that is untenable, then the motivations of the perpetrators of this violence are to be erased by rendering them simply insane. This is a pattern which should stand out as intimately familiar, in my opinion.

But they're not rendered insane. They are physically transformed into goat people with a high percentage of mutations. In the myth, Ragnaglar, the ur-perpetrator, is treated as insane, but in the text we are discussing, the worldly perpetrators physically transform into broo. And you're largely ignoring this. Everything you're saying dodges straightforwardly around this physical transformation, and effectively elides it, because if we accept what the text says, then the specific rape-culture association you're deploying here does not work. The culture does not directly shield rapists, because rapists turn into mutant goat-men who are explicitly driven out from the community. 

Now, I personally don't like that motif, I think it's very poorly conceived because of the associations you're building here, which are straightforwardly derivable from the Thed myth, and how it grinds them to a halt. But it's certainly present in the text, and by removing it, or by removing broo entirely, as is my typical approach, I am deliberately and consciously altering the text to produce "My Glorantha". And so it is inappropriate to present "My Glorantha" as simply the product of the texts taken as themselves, because it's not- it's been redacted, both deliberately and unconsciously. 

Quote

They manifest themselves as Ogres after initiation. Ogres are also much, much more than cannibals. The Red Cow Saga would seem to suggest that they are Ragnaglari, and hold to a rapine view of the entire world, including other Ogres, and most definitely the community and culture in which they are born and raised. This is, again, something latent and unexamined in the Orlanthi warrior culture. It's what happens when outwardly directed violent abuse and dispossession comes home. After cutting past all of the social ritual, when strength remains the ultimate justification, you will find the Ragnaglar impulse.

That is, to me, quite different from the way the Cannibal Cult seems to use the Survival Covenant for its way of life and magic. They are deeply disconcerting to other Praxians, who don't pretend to completely understand them, but like the Morokanth, they are integrated.

Is there a deep moral difference here between being born an ogre and spontaneously becoming one at adulthood? Beyond the question of whether ogre communities, which have existed at least since the 80s, would be chowing down on babies or on teenagers insofar as having ordinary humans born among them, does it really matter for the point that being an ogre is not really within one's control? Unless we're going for "children in Glorantha are full moral agents and are capable of damning themselves by becoming ogres", which is certainly an option. 

I think taking very specifically vicious interpretations of ogres actually makes that option starker- if ogres are simply secret cannibals, then the unfairness of being shaped into the skin of an ogre is something direct, but if ogres are defined by having the mindset of a cosmic rapist, then it's quite simply a statement that some things in the shape of human beings are intrinsically evil. And this is related to the notion of the Other. 

Quote

Ah. I feel it's important to mention here that the existence of the Other is not reducible to the process of Othering. The condition is usually co-constitutive; Chaos is not particularly suggestive of subaltern nativity. And that may ease some of this Lunar difficulty; the Way seeks to integrate the Other while also keeping it Other. Self and Other exist both as opposites and as a unity within the Ultimate. That, to me, is a nearly perfect encapsulation of Lunar mysticism. It would seem to me that to make the Way selective in the suggested manner, to turn We Are All Us into the conviction that the Other does not or should not exist, would be to flatten it into a worse caricature than even the one where it's straight-forwardly evil and antagonistic.

There's a pretty straightforward reason I didn't say "Other" or capitalize "Otherization" in the passage you quoted there, and said "Chaos" and "otherization". But hey, if the answer you're providing is that Lunar mysticism is about piously declaring that small-minded rapists (broo) and broad-thinking rapists (ogres) are to be integrated while keeping them rapists, because as Chaotic beings they are aspects of the Other, what makes it not straightforwardly evil and antagonistic at that point? 

That's probably not what you intended to say, but it's certainly a consequence of deciding to define Chaos in the terms that you have and then carrying it forward to the point of tangling up the abstract construct of the unknowable Other with the concrete, material actions that broo and ogres represent and perform- if these are part of the Other, and Lunar mysticism is about integrating the Other while keeping it Other, then what exactly prevents the "rape is no biggie" interpretation from being an accurate one?