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

[Qizilbashwoman]

39 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

he real-world equivalent has a function: to stop the rival believers disemboweling each other

the real-world shibboleth was explicitly used to disembowel rivals (the Gideonites conquered the Ephraimites, who were identified and murdered using the shibboleth), and historically this was also true: the Bruges Vespers, the Sicilian Vespers, the Gutte Piers purges, Trujillo's genocide of the Haitians...

Edited November 19, 2022 by Qizilbashwoman

[mfbrandi]

16 hours ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

the real-world shibboleth was explicitly used to disembowel rivals

My apologies. I meant it in this sense:

Quote

a belief or custom that is not now considered as important and correct as it was in the past

… rather than this one:

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2b: a custom or usage regarded as distinguishing one group from others

[Darius West]

On 11/17/2022 at 5:05 PM, Eff said:

Orlanth is as we have made him,

Actually he is as Greg made him, and the same goes for the other deities.  Barthes is dead to me.

[Orlanthatemyhamster]

Do we really need another Orlanth subcult?
 

On 11/15/2022 at 2:14 PM, scott-martin said:

Orlanth and Pamalt are the ones who make it their problem. We can dismiss how well they do at that based on how we see their followers behave themselves, but on the whole the world seems to be holding on so somebody is holding it together. I like to think the Net is truly collaborative and you need all the known gods to keep pulling at every station to hold up the cosmos. Some gods need more outside validation than others.

And I think this is part of the baby boomer aspect of Orlanth in particular. He's one of the first of the gods who didn't make the world. He wasn't around for much of creation. All he really does is live here and arrange the resources of the postwar surplus. He invents rock and roll, gets involved in exotic spiritual systems. But push him and he might get a little bewildered and huffy about why there's suffering. It's not really his fault. He was just born here. The government and human nature did it. 

He's not really a martyr in the texts. We can find room for that in there but on the whole the Bath doesn't even appear in the RQ2 version: suffering is something that happens to other people, mom and dad, and we're going to find a new way that gets them a better deal. The emphasis is on adventuring because this is Adventurous. He could forget what he's learned on his adventures at any time, relapse and go back to being Orlanth the teenage dirtbag until the next time the campbellesque Adventure came calling.

I really do think Harmast is where it changes. What Harmast is looking for in his era when whatever archaic storm man they had was almost entirely suppressed was his childhood god, the god of his fathers, an entity he could embody who was still bigger than himself. Someone to look up to. A grownup. In his era, the storm god had been pushed down to the kiddie table where a lot of people still make Barntar sit today. So Harmast gathered up the dad left in his head, went looking and found some friends along the way. He learned how to emulate that dad, be dad, get married. It turned out the god of his fathers and the father of his god were in a similar predicament. He tried to help out.

They are a pastoral people after all. Herd sacrifice, substitutions, the sins of the fathers are visited. Anyhow his adventure brought them into contact with foreign ideas when they needed a boost. They've gotten pretty comfortable lately . . . I can't imagine Kallyr and her people considering even symbolic sacrifice of the central ego as the key, they were instead just looking for a quick and dirty do ut des in their dogeared copies of Umath Arcana or whatever. If we do this thing, a thing happens. It's so predictable we do it every year. But when it stops working, you need to take a deep breath and get back to basics.

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. 

Wrote, 'Orlanth and Pamalt are the ones who make it their problem.'

You probably know better than me, but Pamalt never killed the Sun out of envy, so quite a big difference between the two?

Orlanth only does something when his halls are and empty and he notices (Notices!) his wife has been gone for the longest time, he's pretty much a terrible leader. He doesn't regret in any way what he's done admits it was even partially his fault, he's mostly going to find out where the hell [sic] his wife is (has she run off, or been unfaithful?).

Not much evidence for Orlanth the Repentant I think.

 

[mfbrandi]

14 minutes ago, Orlanthatemyhamster said:

Do we really need another Orlanth subcult?

No, of course not. When I asked in the original post “wouldn’t we expect to see a cult of Orlanth Penitent, worshipping an Orlanth in sackcloth and ashes who is very very sorry?” it was just a dig at the tedious old windbag, not in hope that people would go for the idea. (Although, if you could replace all your existing big O. cults with one easy-to-manage monthly payment …)

It wasn’t just your hamster: he ate all the hamsters. Now he is eyeing-up the guinea pigs.

[Orlanthatemyhamster]

45 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

45 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

It wasn’t just your hamster: he ate all the hamsters. Now he is eyeing-up the guinea pigs.

 

He's having a go at the Guinea Pigs now!

It might be interesting to have this aspect as one of the Rebel Gods, Orlantus, Terminus, other, as a Jakob Marley like figure in the Dara Happa pantheon? Chains an all.

[scott-martin]

4 hours ago, Orlanthatemyhamster said:

You probably know better than me, but Pamalt never killed the Sun out of envy, so quite a big difference between the two?

It's a good question, o my friend of the former runner of the plastic wheel. Quite a big difference between the two because as you point out, while it is Pamalt's responsibility to fix the world, it is never explicitly his fault. Any guilt or blame he has in the murder of the southern sun and other crimes is a secret so deep that it's almost impossible to communicate in most of their languages. They literally developed a whole religious mechanism to avoid saying it.

But Pamalt also steps up immediately whereas Orlanth needs to absorb the repercussions of his actions before he decides to change his life. Pamalt takes responsibility for this because that's what Pamalt does. Whatever the motivating force, this makes him and Orlanth different from most of the gods we hear about. There were once a lot of these survival covenant gods, each with a different and maybe unique orientation to the crime of the world. Now there are fewer.