Orlanth Penitent, the deity-who-learned-better?

[scott-martin]

5 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

Oh, Moonson!

SANDY DENNY, THE ONLY GUEST VOCALIST EVER TO APPEAR ON A LED ZEPPELIN ALBUM: First of all, I think a Rolling Stones track, which might seem a bit of a surprise but I certainly enjoy them as much as everyone else does. This one's from the Beggars Banquet album and it's called "Sympathy for the Devil."

Which is a minor dodge (evasion noted) but big day at the office and I need to find our copy of Kerenyi's Prometheus to review the Goethe stuff going on here.

[Eff]

3 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

See also Oedipus.

Is the monomyth really the tale of the culture hero who does something for the people or is it a “me decade” story of “personal development”? I have problems with some myths of the redemption of the world by (any shuffling of) suffering, death, and rebirth. Some make a kind of sense: the sun dies every evening and is reborn every morning, and so the cycle of days is preserved — but really, perhaps, that is just an explanatory myth. Or in other myths, the god will suffer and we benefit, but the suffering doesn’t cause the benefit (e.g. Prometheus). Or the divine being or giant is dismembered to yield the parts to build the world (and so probably doesn’t come back). Those examples are all fine, but a bald “I suffered and died and returned, so the world is saved, so you better be grateful” doesn’t really cut it for me; it just seems decontextualized, a stranded myth fragment. (I don’t say this is what is going on in Christianity — I don’t know enough about it — but from the outside, it sometimes looks that way: as if only part of the myth has survived.) Wakboth — that retcon still grates — and Arachne Solara save the world; the others are bit players, and their suffering cannot make them more important.

If we put Orlanth as saviour aside, how well does the story work as one of personal development? Is the reassembled Orlanth better than the old one? Is new Orlanth sadder but wiser, or just unbearably smug at having done “his” good deed? Or unbearably smug because new Orlanth is exactly like old Orlanth? I don’t know. I do know that Oedipus and Jocasta don’t skip off into the sunset hand in hand.

Well, the monomyth is a construction of psychology, and Orlanth's not quite a culture hero. 

But the fixing of the world only happens by breaking the looping structure. Once Orlanth's gone through the Baths of Nelat (in the KoS version) the third iteration of the loop closes. What happens next is something which violates the narrative logic of tyrannical uncles being overthrown by bloodthirsty nephews on behalf of suffering parents- the tyrannical uncle Yelm and the bloodthirsty nephew Orlanth are able to partially shuck their roles and become less tyrannical and less bloodthirsty. The bloodthirsty nephew Kajabor is thus able to be integrated into the universe (via an advanced kink scene) and the problem of the tyrannical uncle Orlanth is resolved with an explicitly temporal and not permanent peace- and this produces linear time. 

So what saves the world is the willingness of the participants in it to bend and compromise, and by this means they are able to produce a transformation of Kajabor/entropy, a rotation of that puzzle piece to fit into the patchwork jigsaw. Or- I Fought We Won is a recapitulation of the Lightbringers Quest and the Lightbringers Quest is a recapitulation of I Fought We Won. 

[mfbrandi]

1 hour ago, Eff said:

The bloodthirsty nephew Kajabor is thus able to be integrated into the universe (via an advanced kink scene)

Well, that is the version I grew up on, too, except that the nephew is surely Wakboth. Kajabor is the Outside — Chaos taken neat. Wakboth is what happens when illumination goes bad (Ragnaglar & company) or is the universe’s allergic reaction to the Outside — a chaotic feature on the grand scale. Consume evil and “spit” out Time seems to me a very dreary view of the mundane world, but I am assured that is the New Orthodoxy. Ho hum!

I think in another thread someone mentioned Orlanth Dragonslayer/Dragonfriend and the dragonslaying as utuma. Wakboth in Argrath & the Devil is portrayed as serpentine, and perhaps we can see the consumption of the gods by Wakboth and the subsequent slice & dice of Wakboth this way: the gods — and the big O as Storm personified in particular — realise that they were the “moral evil” of the world all along (“eaten by” becomes “see that they are”) and the dicing of Wakboth is their utuma, which creates, finally, the mundane world not ravaged by gods and their petty wars (4th Age).

2 hours ago, Eff said:

I Fought We Won is a recapitulation of the Lightbringers Quest and the Lightbringers Quest is a recapitulation of I Fought We Won.

Sure.

[soltakss]

5 hours ago, scott-martin said:

I always liked how it used to be such a surprise that Argrath comes back with Sheng. If you look at it closely, it's not business as usual down there. He really has to push until they come up with something truly unexpected and spectacular. The texts always used to be very clear, very few people even think to try this . . . and very, very, very few of them succeed at this deep level. Harmast did it. Argrath does something like Harmast, apparently. 

Sheng Seleris knew that he had to die and be bound in a Lunar Hell in order to discover the powers to defeat the Red Emperor.

He allowed himself to be bound and returned with the knowledge.

A few decades later, Sheng Seleris defeated and killed the Red Emperor permanently, devouring his flesh and becoming Emperor himself.

A cunning plan indeed.

[mfbrandi]

2 hours ago, soltakss said:

Sheng Seleris knew that he had to die and be bound in a Lunar Hell in order to discover the powers to defeat the Red Emperor.

This I like.

2 hours ago, soltakss said:

He allowed himself to be bound and returned with the knowledge.

I admit that this would show great self-control, but somehow fighting like hell not to die and be tortured post mortem — even though he knows he has to die to carry out his plan — seems more … ‘poetic’?

Now we wait for @scott-martin to tell us that the ‘Sheng’ seemingly sprung from that custom lunar hell was really Genert!

[Darius West]

On 11/15/2022 at 3:22 AM, mfbrandi said:

So among the other aspects, wouldn’t we expect to see a cult of Orlanth Penitent, worshipping an Orlanth in sackcloth and ashes who is very very sorry? Is there such a cult (or something similar)?

The answer is unequivocally Danfive Xaron.

[mfbrandi]

14 hours ago, Darius West said:

The answer is unequivocally Danfive Xaron.

Quote

Danfive Xaron was a bloodthirsty outlaw who volunteered for the most dangerous task in the ritual and was called “Bridge for the Seeker.” His partial success earned him the position of Gatekeeper, Porter, and Night Watchman for the pantheon. — Cults of Prax, p. 38

I do like this, and he is certainly very sorry. I have never seen the “partial success” explained, but it fits nicely with lunar evolution not being done and with Argrath and the Devil being [a] part of the Lunar plan and [b] the next (and possibly final) step in the implementation of the Great Compromise.

Because I am an idiot, in playing the popular party game of Which of the 7 Mothers is Which of the 7 Lightbringers?, I never thought to make Danfive Xaron = Orlanth. We have tentative and anyway decade-old word of Jeff that “[t]he closest thing [to Trickster] might be Danfive Xaron”, but I rather fancied him as the dark twin of Issaries (as Yelmalio is the dark twin of Zorak Zoran). Issaries has the runes of Mobility (change, freedom), Harmony, and Issaries (fair exchange, so balance is not really a stretch) and — in his current configuration — DX has Moon (constrained change, balance), Harmony (a straight match), and Death (which — squinting very hard at it — is half of an Issaries rune: the take half without the giving half, ostensibly) — so there is considerable runic resonance. They are both psychopomps: “Danfive Xaron” is fooling no one, he is clearly “Danfive Charon”, even if he says the ferryman is just his mate. If we buy the line that a god’s children are often aspects or manifestations of them, recall this famous bit about Garzeen/Middleman:

Quote

[H]e must reassemble the body of the Chaos-slain god Genert. Some fragments of that pre-temporal deity were floating about in various guises, and there was a legend of a mystical “growing ground” in the depths of the desert. Assembling the whole god was impossible. But now, whenever any follower of Garzeen’s way comes across such a piece they are obliged to depart for Genert’s desert within one week to try to fulfill the ancient vow.

And now I begin to make sense — perhaps — of @scott-martin’s suggestion that Genert = the Sun, and we have all long suspected that Orlanth = Chaos. (Storm didn’t let Chaos into the world, it was Chaos getting into the world, but as that was good and necessary, I don’t hold it against them. On the other hand, if Storm is just a chaotic feature/crazy immune response (sepsis), that is a whole other more Ragnaglarian story.) If we buy the Rashoran–Nysalor–Moon connection, the Middleman Desert Trek and Bridge for the Seeker Self-Sacrifice projects begin to coalesce, no?

If this parallel has any legs, I don’t really want to feed Issaries into the god-swallowing black hole that is Orlanth. I would rather have it that all Orlanth learned is that he could lose — not that he could be wrong — and that it was those around him on the quest who got some wisdom.

Digression hidden, because it is a digression:

Spoiler

Are there any plausible complete sets of Mothers–Lightbringers equivalences? I could hazard:

1. Danfive Xaron = Issaries (psychopomps)
2. Teelo Norri = Flesh Man (innocent bystanders)
3. Irripi Ontor = Lhankor Mhy (sages)
4. “She Who Waits” = Ginna Jar (though that hasn’t always looked right)

Which leaves, on the one hand, Lunar gods whose utility is clear enough:

• Jakaleel the Witch (ZZ, trollish, and shamanic connections)
• Queen Deezola (now an Earth priestess, but in a previous iteration dedicated to the Sun Spider)
• Yanafal Tarnils (a Humakti)

… and on the other, Lightbringers who seem poor “evil twins” for them:

• Orlanth
• Chalana Arroy
• Eurmal

Edited November 16, 2022 by mfbrandi
italics

[JRE]

My own take is that Orlanth was missing a key element to be a penitent most of the time, which is repentance. He was quite happy cutting heads and electrocuting foes during the Lesser Darkness. When his lady love went missing, or possibly, Lysistrata like, just withdrew her favors till he made things better, he went to do just that, with no real idea of what was needed. As he met others questing for answers, he decided to join them to see if those quests could show how to fulfill his. Enlightened self interest, rather than repentance.

However it is true that Orlanth changes as the quest goes on, or possibly he learns from the people that travel with him that he lacks something, and try to do the right thing because it is right, and not because he will benefit from it.

If we take the two clear cases we know of a succesful LBQ, Harmast did not feel penitent for Arkat, who he did not know, and I am pretty sure Argrath was not interested in making up to Sheng. They wanted a weapon against their enemies, whether the Broken Council or the New Moon Empire. That would indicate that at certain level Orlanth wanted a weapon against his enemy, and I cannot help but wonder if he just wanted a weapon against the Uz, and that is why Yelm was his choice (who had been killed before Chaos officially came to Glorantha), rather than a weapon against Chaos or his nephew (shades of Mordred at play too).

In my view, the new Orlanth still gets Yelm, but he no longer wants to use him as a weapon, as the quest has shown him there are bigger problems in Glorantha, and he cannot do it on his own. It is this spirit of collaboration that becomes, or is seized by Arachne Solara, the ghost of the world that was hiding as a humble spider deity to get the remaining gods to lend her their power, and bind Kajabor in hell (it cannot be Wakboth, as he was, and still is, under the block). Orlanth and Yelm, and by following their example all remaining beings, pooled their power and gifted it to the spider, who if she was not the ghost of Glorantha, was that ghost now, catapulted by all that power.

I never get the feeling of repentance, and instead you get the vibe that Orlanth would do it again. I am sure The killing of the Evil Emperor is one of the most popular cult heroquests among freedom loving Orlanthi, which shows Orlanth's followers do not share the idea of repentance. It is pragmatism that pushes them to ally with their enemy to save at least part of their world. Eurmal is unable to repent, and Orlanth can always blame Eurmal, so nobody needs to be really repentant.

So the key event is not getting the back the sun, even if it was what Orlanth picked as his aim, but accepting they are all in this together, and that they fight together because they live or die together. Like in Backdraft, "You go, we go". Or, "I fought, we won." The sun is the Macguffin just to get all the gods dead and facing oblivion together. 

If Arachne Solara was in hell, she either started there, or had died at some point. Who is behind the mask?

 

[hipsterinspace]

4 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Digression hidden, because it is a digression:

  Hide contents

Are there any plausible complete sets of Mothers–Lightbringers equivalences? I could hazard:

1. Danfive Xaron = Issaries (psychopomps)
2. Teelo Norri = Flesh Man (innocent bystanders)
3. Irripi Ontor = Lhankor Mhy (sages)
4. “She Who Waits” = Ginna Jar (though that hasn’t always looked right)

Which leaves, on the one hand, Lunar gods whose utility is clear enough:

• Jakaleel the Witch (ZZ, trollish, and shamanic connections)
• Queen Deezola (now an Earth priestess, but in a previous iteration dedicated to the Sun Spider)
• Yanafal Tarnils (a Humakti)

… and on the other, Lightbringers who seem poor “evil twins” for them:

• Orlanth
• Chalana Arroy
• Eurmal

Yanafal Tarnils = Orlanth (the leader)
Deezola = Chalana Arroy (the healer)
Jakaleel = Issaries (the psychopomp)
Teelo Norri = Flesh Man (the sacrifice)
Irippi Ontor = Lhankor Mhy (the scholar)
Danfive Xaron = Eurmal (the trickster, perhaps he failed because he didn't betray the others)
She Who Waits = Ginna Jar (the unknowable other)

Which certainly hints that perhaps Danfive Xaron is one of the few entities who takes penitence and contrition as so fundamental to his mythic identity that it becomes all that he is, maybe even to the point of being an obstacle in his original mythic task.

Edited November 16, 2022 by hipsterinspace

[mfbrandi]

1 hour ago, JRE said:

I never get the feeling of repentance, and instead you get the vibe that Orlanth would do it again.

That was the feeling I have always gotten, which is why I asked. My instinct is always to slag off Orlanth, but I thought I would give people a chance to argue for another side to the Big O.

1 hour ago, JRE said:

Arachne Solara, the ghost of the world that was hiding as a humble spider deity to get the remaining gods to lend her their power, and bind Kajabor in hell (it cannot be Wakboth, as he was, and still is, under the block).

Well, it used to be Kajabor in the net — and we liked it, and it made sense to us — but there is evidence that new canon is that it is Wakboth:

I don’t especially like it, but there it is: our cheese got moved. As for Wakboth’s body being under the block, surely that is no barrier to him turning up in Hell — I mean, that is kinda how it works, right? In the before times, Kajabor was supposed to have gotten to Hell by being killed by Wakboth, no?

What is humble about a spider deity? I heard on the radio today (BBC’s All in the Mind) that some scientists claim to have found a REM sleep-like state in a species of jumping spider; I like to think Arachne Solara is dreaming us all.

1 hour ago, JRE said:

Arachne Solara … Who is behind the mask?

Or who are mere masks or sock puppets of her? She is old — older than the celestial court — and her web stretches everywhere binding light to dark, being to nothingness. Indeed, some form of bagua — the union of opposites sitting in a spider web of trigrams — seems as good a diagram of Glorantha as any:

May Arachne Solara bless and protect us!

Edited November 16, 2022 by mfbrandi
bagua

[Eff]

Orlanth = Sun Wukong
Eurmal = Zhu Bajie
Lhankor Mhy = Sha Wujing
Issaries = Prince Bai Long Ma
Chalana Arroy = Tang Sanzang
Flesh Man = Taizong Emperor
Ginna Jar = Avalokitesvara/Guan Yin

Wait, I don't think that's the right comparison!

In any case, I think that any one-to-one comparison between the 7M and Lightbringers is perhaps missing the point, in that the two quests are straightforwardly opposites of each other- one is to bring back the lost order, and the other is to smash the current order.

[Darius West]

7 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Because I am an idiot, in playing the popular party game of Which of the 7 Mothers is Which of the 7 Lightbringers?, I never thought to make Danfive Xaron = Orlanth. We have tentative and anyway decade-old word of Jeff that “[t]he closest thing [to Trickster] might be Danfive Xaron”, but I rather fancied him as the dark twin of Issaries (as Yelmalio is the dark twin of Zorak Zoran). Issaries has the runes of Mobility (change, freedom), Harmony, and Issaries (fair exchange, so balance is not really a stretch) and — in his current configuration — DX has Moon (constrained change, balance), Harmony (a straight match), and Death (which — squinting very hard at it — is half of an Issaries rune: the take half without the giving half, ostensibly) — so there is considerable runic resonance. They are both psychopomps: “Danfive Xaron” is fooling no one, he is clearly “Danfive Charon”, even if he says the ferryman is just his mate. If we buy the line that a god’s children are often aspects or manifestations of them, recall this famous bit about Garzeen/Middleman:

Back when I met him, Greg told me that the 7 Mothers were doing a modified 7 Lightbringers quest to "restore light"; in this case the moon.  He also said that the "Penitent Criminal" (Danfive Zaron) was Orlanth, from a Yelmic perspective.

[Darius West]

I should also point out that I really like Orlanth for being the only deity to actually admit he could be wrong about things.  Most deities are towering narcissists who never admit they have ever done anything wrong.  You won't hear Yelm admitting he's a narrow minded tyrant.  You won't see Magasta second guessing himself for being a cold blooded psychopath with a perverse fetish for giant monsters.  You'll never hear Zzabur admit that maybe he over-reacted a bit, or Ernalda thinking that perhaps she shouldn't be quite so loose, or maybe even Chalana Arroy thinking "Ya know, I really wish I could moider dat bum". Well, Orlanth can admit he's made a mistake, and that is why he is a great ruler.

[Nick Brooke]

Duh. Yanafal Tarnils = Eurmal, obviously.

(He’s a killer, with a Death Rune he stole from its owner, who twists Truth)

[Eff]

3 hours ago, Darius West said:

I should also point out that I really like Orlanth for being the only deity to actually admit he could be wrong about things.  Most deities are towering narcissists who never admit they have ever done anything wrong.  You won't hear Yelm admitting he's a narrow minded tyrant.  You won't see Magasta second guessing himself for being a cold blooded psychopath with a perverse fetish for giant monsters.  You'll never hear Zzabur admit that maybe he over-reacted a bit, or Ernalda thinking that perhaps she shouldn't be quite so loose, or maybe even Chalana Arroy thinking "Ya know, I really wish I could moider dat bum". Well, Orlanth can admit he's made a mistake, and that is why he is a great ruler.

This is assuredly more a function of Orlanth being the cult that has existed for the longest in Runequest and Glorantha's real-world history and receiving the largest quantity of fan attention and fleshing-out, rather than because there's something intrinsically different about Orlanth as compared to other gods. 

Orlanth is as we have made him, and Ernalda is as we have made her, and Magasta is as we have made them, and Yelm is as we have made him. Saying that Yelm exists without doubts as if that condemned him- no, Yelm only has the projected existence of a fictional character, one defined by reinterpretation by each group or even each player. 

Does Chalana Arroy ever contemplate violence? Who says she does or doesn't either way? Who's actually sat down and determined for all players and all groups that Chalana's pacifism isn't an active commitment, but instead a sign of her pigheaded refusal to kill people? 

Indeed, who can really claim to have spent enough time in Ernalda's head to say, "she's just the pantheon bicycle, nothing more"? Who has devoted the time and the energy to play with Ernalda to that degree, and on that interpersonal I-have-contended-with-God level? 

[mfbrandi]

5 hours ago, Darius West said:

Well, Orlanth can admit he's made a mistake, and that is why he is a great ruler.

And yet, we have to reach for an “enemy” cult to illustrate this — which is not to say you are wrong, but to some of us, it does look like he is a politician saying, “Mistakes were made, but I have made my non-apology apology, so now we have to move on. You think I’m bad? Look at that Chaos fiend over there.”

The Great Compromise was a step forward, but if Orlanth wants to take credit for it and offer it as his penance or act of restitution, he should be able to say why Time, the child of the top deity of the Balance (AS) and Chaos (Kajabor or Wakboth to taste) — both of which he seems to be against — is the rightful controller of the universe. Can he? Does he? (I could easily have missed it — I am very sloppy.) I imagine that he is instead off cluelessly “perfecting” his performance of Mel Brooks’ “It’s Good to be the King Rap”, but then I don’t seem to have it in me to even try to be fair to Orlanth.

2 hours ago, Eff said:

This is assuredly more a function of Orlanth being the cult that has existed for the longest in Runequest and Glorantha's real-world history and receiving the largest quantity of fan attention and fleshing-out, rather than because there's something intrinsically different about Orlanth as compared to other gods. 

And this may be part of why Orlanth grates so: enough already, just leave us alone, and please no more “poetry”. It is like growing up in a country with compulsory Christianity, for a fraction of the population, that will be enough to take against ol’ JC — “You want me to sing a song of praise to your god? What, again?”

[Darius West]

52 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

 which is not to say you are wrong, but to some of us, it does look like he is a politician saying, “Mistakes were made, but I have made my non-apology apology, so now we have to move on. You think I’m bad? Look at that Chaos fiend over there.”

I think you're straight up wrong here mfbrandi.  Orlanth takes full personal responsibility and faces the bath of Nelat.  If you think the usual deity narcissism suhc as you might receive from Yelm (who did nothing wrong) is better I fear you've grasped nothing.  A good portion of why the Gods fared so badly against chaos is because the gods were narcissists who could never admit their shortcomings and "did nothing wrong".  In this sense, Orlanth is the best of the gods, because he is the wisest and the only one who understands their limitations.

Edited November 17, 2022 by Darius West

[mfbrandi]

1 hour ago, Darius West said:

I think you're straight up wrong here mfbrandi.

Fair enough.

1 hour ago, Darius West said:

If you think the usual deity narcissism such as you might receive from Yelm is better I fear you've grasped nothing.

I am not trying to big up the personality of Yelm, although it still may be true that I have grasped nothing, of course.

[Akhôrahil]

On 11/14/2022 at 5:53 PM, g33k said:

Orlanth's penitence is more of a "this was my f-ckup, and I need to do whatever it takes to set things right."

Agree - Orlanth goes and fixes stuff rather than wallows in his sinfulness. 

[mfbrandi]

16 hours ago, Eff said:

In any case, I think that any one-to-one comparison between the 7M and Lightbringers is perhaps missing the point, in that the two quests are straightforwardly opposites of each other- one is to bring back the lost order, and the other is to smash the current order.

Well, the Guide version of the LBQ (vol. 1, p. 123) does give us this exchange:

Quote

Orlanth made his Promise of the Future.
He said there could be a future,
and it would be like the past.

Yelm demanded, “Which past?” …

Orlanth said, “Like all of them.”

Which sounds like Bill and Ted to me. Maybe they wised up fast, but maybe Arachne Solara sprung something on them they weren’t expecting. I mean, how could they be expecting Time (whose birth was concealed, too)?

Perhaps in both cases, the quest was just to end a current situation considered intolerable. An LBQ may have an end — however vague — in mind, but perhaps if it works one always gets the unexpected (not what the audience volunteer wrote on the paper and sealed in the envelope before the magician began to wave her wand).

Edited November 17, 2022 by mfbrandi
whitespace

[John Biles]

On 11/16/2022 at 4:30 PM, JRE said:

My own take is that Orlanth was missing a key element to be a penitent most of the time, which is repentance. He was quite happy cutting heads and electrocuting foes during the Lesser Darkness. When his lady love went missing, or possibly, Lysistrata like, just withdrew her favors till he made things better, he went to do just that, with no real idea of what was needed. As he met others questing for answers, he decided to join them to see if those quests could show how to fulfill his. Enlightened self interest, rather than repentance.

Ernalda goes into her coma after Orlanth leaves on the Lightbringer Quest.  

He goes to find how to stop the world breaking, then eventually ends up having to repent his own mistake of killing Yelm.

 

On 11/16/2022 at 4:30 PM, JRE said:

I never get the feeling of repentance, and instead you get the vibe that Orlanth would do it again. I am sure The killing of the Evil Emperor is one of the most popular cult heroquests among freedom loving Orlanthi, which shows Orlanth's followers do not share the idea of repentance. It is pragmatism that pushes them to ally with their enemy to save at least part of their world. Eurmal is unable to repent, and Orlanth can always blame Eurmal, so nobody needs to be really repentant.

 

Orlanth repents for his mistakes after basically undergoing a deadly test he only survives due to the support of others.

Heroquests generally are not about learning nothing and not changing.

But of course, the Lightbringer Quest is the end of Orlanth's story; to me, that says, this has to resolve all his screwups and it does.  He learns and becomes less of a dumbass.

On 11/17/2022 at 2:48 AM, mfbrandi said:

And yet, we have to reach for an “enemy” cult to illustrate this — which is not to say you are wrong, but to some of us, it does look like he is a politician saying, “Mistakes were made, but I have made my non-apology apology, so now we have to move on. You think I’m bad? Look at that Chaos fiend over there.”

The Great Compromise was a step forward, but if Orlanth wants to take credit for it and offer it as his penance or act of restitution, he should be able to say why Time, the child of the top deity of the Balance (AS) and Chaos (Kajabor or Wakboth to taste) — both of which he seems to be against — is the rightful controller of the universe. Can he? Does he? (I could easily have missed it — I am very sloppy.) I imagine that he is instead off cluelessly “perfecting” his performance of Mel Brooks’ “It’s Good to be the King Rap”, but then I don’t seem to have it in me to even try to be fair to Orlanth.

 

The Great Compromise isn't his personal act of restitution - he undergoes a trial, then undergoes a formal apology and atonement while still in the Underworld with dead Yelm.

(Though he does put forward the central idea that all contradictory pasts will be true, a key part of the Great Compromise.)

 

[mfbrandi]

11 hours ago, John Biles said:

Though he does put forward the central idea that all contradictory pasts will be true, a key part of the Great Compromise.

I know it is not your fault, John, but it is a shame that Orlanth’s big idea is flat out incomprehensible: saying that two pasts are contradictory is just saying that they cannot both be true.

I know myths are often filled with flights of fancy, but having a character in a myth seem to break the fourth wall to ask us to believe in contradictions seems a pretty good way of breaking the so-called suspension of disbelief. Maybe it is just me. Maybe Calvino could have gotten away with it. Ho hum — six impossible things before breakfast and all that … onward and upward!

Edited November 19, 2022 by mfbrandi
softened wording (after private conversation)

[mfbrandi]

 I hope John won’t mind my quoting him from another thread:

12 hours ago, John Biles said:

We know that in the Great Compromise, part of it was that all pasts were now true (in the mystical world; the physical world only has one past).

That's how you can discover new myths, ie, myths *you did not know about*.

If we take the strong version of this account (attributed to Orlanth), which may not be John’s intention — any tale you can dream up about the Godtime is true (however hard it may be to make it have consequences in Time) — then it rather undercuts the claim that Orlanth is taking responsibility for his actions, for he is saying, “It is my fault, but it is not my fault, and it is not Yelm’s fault, but it is Yelm’s fault, and … [ad infinitum]”, no?

Isn’t this cakeism? Be careful, as the UK has recently discovered that cakes are ambush predators.

Meanwhile, trust the mystics to take the down-to-earth view. That is why they never get invited to parties.

[scott-martin]

Well when the vicar visits it's either cake or death, isn't it. I love how this thread has laid bare the priestly orientation lurking behind the "god time must be abstract and simultaneous because otherwise how could all these stories be true as we have agreed to agree" shibboleth. A god in the theyalan view, as we all know, cannot "change" or "learn" or decide to do things differently. That's on us alone, the mortals. Maybe the gods are allowed at best to cycle. Otherwise, a priest might've said once, what's the point in emulating an entity who screws up, changes his mind, disrupts, makes things worse before they get better? That grubby entity prone to failure could not be not our god, the king of the gods. That's some kind of trickster or even something tied to the moon or worse. And we don't have to reconcile the stories because by definition that's the kind of story that doesn't make sense. Forget it, Jake. It's god time.

To the extent to which the gods are characters, maybe, they enter into the structures of the world and participate in narrative. This narrative will be punctuated and fragmentary, something that partakes in both the archaic and the modernist. We put the fragments together like isolated panels cut from a comic strip. Rules and intermediaries evolve historically to restrict the way the fragments are collected and who is allowed to have an opinion. "There is no answer" is no answer. Sometimes the compromise of civil religion becomes a net that holds adventurers back.

 

[mfbrandi]

1 hour ago, scott-martin said:

I love how this thread has laid bare the priestly orientation lurking behind the "god time must be abstract and simultaneous because otherwise how could all these stories be true as we have agreed to agree" shibboleth.

That contradictions can be true is just that, a shibboleth — it is not true (in/of Glorantha … or anywhere) and it is not useful (to the players … nor seemingly to the Gloranthans).

The real-world equivalent has a function: to stop the rival believers disemboweling each other, which is always an awkward moment at a dinner party. None of us wants to see that. We would never get the stains out of the carpet, for one thing. But that makes it neither true nor intelligible, just — in some limited circumstances — useful.

This doesn’t work in Glorantha: however “liberal” or “inclusive” the metaphysics behind the theology, the opposing sides will go to war, anyway:

ORLANTHI DRUNK A: “If all the contradictory accounts of the doings of the gods are true — and they must be, as Orlanth told me so in this very bar — why don’t we just pay lip service to the Red Goddess [spits] and get on with the civilized sport of cattle raiding? It has a body count, I admit, but it beats the hell out of war.”
ORLANTHI DRUNK B: “Must … fight … chaos!” [belches and collapses]

So why the attachment to the contradictions can be true thing? Is it an embrace of poorly understood godlearnerism? Surely the godlearners themselves were instrumentalists:

GODLEARNER A: “If we work on the assumption that p, I can make this EWF fortification explode.”
GODLEARNER B: “Yeah, but is it true that p?”
GODLEARNER A: “Who knows? Weren’t you listening? I can make this thing explode!”

And if next week, GL A has to work from the assumption that not p to get the jelly to set, that’s just fine: they don’t believe either, never mind both; they probably believe that one or the other is true — because, you know: p or not p — but they couldn’t say which; so long as they have an idea of which premises to stick into which arguments, the arguments are valid (though clearly not all sound), and they get their explosion or dessert, then they are happy. Till Arachne Solara (or whoever) squishes them all like bugs.