When exactly does Ernalda die ?

[Agentorange]

I have been reading about how babeester Gor sprang from the body of her mother ( ernalda ) so on and so forth. And am struggling with the whole timeline  of it all. before we get all metaphysical all things happen at the same time etc etc, just humour me.

In the whole context of lesser darkness, greater darkness, chaos devouring everything etc etc, when does Ernalda die in the whole process.....and when does she come back to life ?

Edited January 11, 2023 by Agentorange

[Eff]

2 hours ago, Agentorange said:

I have been reading about how babeester Gor sprang from the body of her mother ( ernalda ) so on and so forth. And am struggling with the whole timeline  of it all. before we get all metaphysical all things happen at the same time etc etc, just humour me.

In the whole context of lesser darkness, greater darkness, chaos devouring everything etc etc, when does Ernalda die in the whole process.....and when does she come back to life ?

I assume she dies sometime during the Greater Darkness and comes back to life with the rest of the gods at the Dawn, or perhaps a little earlier.

Yes, Babeester Gor does appear before this, but that's myth, etc. (If you want a naturalistic timeline, perhaps there's a Young Ernalda Adventures where she has her first confrontations with Nontraya and Zorak Zoran where Babeester Gor first appears.)

[Qizilbashwoman]

30 minutes ago, Eff said:

perhaps there's a Young Ernalda Adventures

haha i instantly saw the cover of a YA book where Ernalda is like in an action pose on a rock with one leg up

[John Biles]

Ernalda dies after Orlanth goes on the Lightbringer Quest, then is alive again by the time he returns.

 

[metcalph]

4 hours ago, Agentorange said:

In the whole context of lesser darkness, greater darkness, chaos devouring everything etc etc, when does Ernalda die in the whole process.....and when does she come back to life ?

I always interpreted the following passage:

Quote

But the feast went poorly. First, Orlanth’s wife was not present. This disturbed the god,
as it always did, for the seat beside him was empty, and half of his conversations were spoken
to empty space. And others from his household were gone, too, so that the beer was flat, the
hearth was cold, and the food was no better than cold porridge. Furthermore, the feast was
disturbed. Whenever some person was called upon to admire or present a tool, he was called
away by some combat or other duty elsewhere. Often they did not return.

KoS p68

as suggesting Ernalda was already dead before the Lightbringers Quest started.  Gods of Glorantha (AH) had her and other Earth Gods going to sleep in protest at the murder of Flamal.  

[Joerg]

7 hours ago, John Biles said:

Ernalda dies after Orlanth goes on the Lightbringer Quest, then is alive again by the time he returns.

There is a myth that states Orlanth enters the Underworld to bring back his missing wife.

 

On the whole, "When did Ernalda die?" is a trick question. After all, "She is not dead, She is sleeping."

When Nontraya (Vivamort before his encounter with Wakboth) led his hell horde to Ezel, he encountered a procession with Ernalda on a bier, carried by weeping attendants, possibly heading to Necropolis. (I strongly suspect that Nontraya/Vivamort is the Death who was tricked by Tada to protect Eiritha, too.)

Now Necropolis/Koravaka may be one of those places which make you technically dead by entering. Orlanth and Ernalda return together, hand in hand, exiting alongside Yelm from the Gates of Dawn. And at Kero Fin, and at Ezel, and other such places.

[David Scott]

14 hours ago, Agentorange said:

In the whole context of lesser darkness, greater darkness, chaos devouring everything etc etc, when does Ernalda die in the whole process.....and when does she come back to life ?

Ernalda goes to the Underworld (dies) after Flamal is slain by Death (by Eurmal / Zorak Zoran), along with lots of other land goddesses (eg Pelora, Ralia). She sleeps until Orlanth reaches her on the Lightbringers Quest (likely after the trial Trial by Combat). Ernalda now released helps Arachne Solara birth time (as the midwife of Time). She is reborn at the Dawn alongside Yelm and Orlanth, and the Earth comes back to life.

This is all from the Glorantha Sourcebook.

[mfbrandi]

41 minutes ago, David Scott said:

Ernalda now released helps Arachne Solara birth time (as the midwife of Time).

She seems an unlikely midwife of time.

If I were a spider, I would (a) lay eggs, or (b) call in Xiola Umbar, or (c) do it all with smoke and mirrors. (Secretly releasing darling little Kajabor-as-baby-alien with the advice “don’t eat it all at once or you’ll be hungry again in an hour” — that is the way to start time!)

Of course, there is Ernalda the Magician:

Quote

Ernalda has always known how to spin, measure, and cut the threads of Creation … she rewove the tattered cloth of Creation and created the Compromise that saved the world and ended the Great Darkness.

… but in that aspect, she seems to be Arachne Solara — — rather than her helper/co-conspirator. (Some cult is merely disguising itself as an earth cult … or it has delusions of grandeur.)

[David Scott]

19 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

She seems an unlikely midwife of time.

It's likely different cultures version of the myth have different midwives. But is one of Ernalda's titles.

24 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

If I were a spider,

You are using that in the loosest sense: https://wellofdaliath.chaosium.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Glorantha-16-Arachne-Solara.jpg

[scott-martin]

1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

call in Xiola Umbar,

I think that whoever developed the Arachne-Ernalda-Glorantha complex probably already did a lot of that. Some aspects of what we now call XU are still embedded in the official story of the transcendental Earth Queen . . . 

. . . except as far as I know, there is no one official story. The grandmothers have been fighting. In the aftermath of a savage religious civil conflict, theology and deep myth are in flux. Someone will put a coherent narrative of the goddess together from the available components (tradition and revelation) and someone will skulk away to nurse the scraps. I could drone on about "multiple historical Ernaldas" exactly like how we talk about a syncretic Orlanth or a syncretic Yelm, but that's not nearly as fun as discovering the controversies in play.

All I know here is that the really big houses in Nochet have shrines to someone we could call Black Ernalda. Maybe this is an artifact of poor art preservation as the pigments finally break down over Time, but the girls running the houses have come up with a more useful interpretation, "nigra sum sed formosa," they shrug. The goddess is a green goddess but she is a black goddess also.

And I think about what the big old boys in the local Issaries cult say when they get "tired and emotional" about our god being a black god and it makes sense. In some places, they remember their Ernalda dying. In others, she just vanished and came back later, said she was sleeping. Sometimes she was in love with Flamal, sometimes married to the sun. A weaver weaves some strands together into knots while leaving space for others to run.

[John Biles]

3 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

She seems an unlikely midwife of time.

As the goddess of the crops, she seems pretty strongly linked to time to me, and she functions as a midwife among other things for everything else, so...

 

[Jeff]

Ernalda goes to sleep/dies every Dark Season, when the fertile earth is covered with snow and frost. You can't grow anything, the leaves are all gone, and grain is nothing but dead stalk. I can see it just outside my office.

[Agentorange]

1 hour ago, Jeff said:

Ernalda goes to sleep/dies every Dark Season, when the fertile earth is covered with snow and frost. You can't grow anything, the leaves are all gone, and grain is nothing but dead stalk. I can see it just outside my office.

Winter wheat is all I'm going to say here 😄

Durum.....is pasta a thing in Glorantha ?

Edited January 12, 2023 by Agentorange

[mfbrandi]

20 hours ago, John Biles said:

she seems pretty strongly linked to time to me

I wasn’t trying to tell David he was wrong (see Ernalda’s entry in the Glorantha Sourcebook, pp. 89–90 for the midwife of Time quote), and of course many “people” in the story are tied to temporal cycles — wind, sun, earth/crops — as it is a just-so story about the origin of those cycles. Nonetheless the midwife bit — that struck me odd. Just a personal quirk, I guess.

Edited January 13, 2023 by mfbrandi
tweaked; added GS page reference

[Jeff]

9 minutes ago, Agentorange said:

Winter wheat is all I'm going to say here 😄

Durum.....is pasta a thing in Glorantha ?

Winter wheat is certainly planted in Esrolia, where they say Esrolia sleeps through the winter. You harvest it in early Fire Season.

But in Dragon Pass it is rarer, and most say Esrolia dies each winter.

[Agentorange]

5 minutes ago, Jeff said:

Winter wheat is certainly planted in Esrolia, where they say Esrolia sleeps through the winter. You harvest it in early Fire Season.

But in Dragon Pass it is rarer, and most say Esrolia dies each winter.

so......each of the various land/grain goddesses tend to be associated with a particular kind of grain or cereal. Do the lesser known or more obscure grains have their own goddesses. Or is it more the other way round ? That the grains just happens to grow in that goddesses land and that's the association ( if you see what I mean )

[John Biles]

1 hour ago, Agentorange said:

so......each of the various land/grain goddesses tend to be associated with a particular kind of grain or cereal. Do the lesser known or more obscure grains have their own goddesses. Or is it more the other way round ? That the grains just happens to grow in that goddesses land and that's the association ( if you see what I mean )

The infamous Goddess Switch of the God-Learners revolved around goddesses in different lands of different grains; I have the impression every grain has its own goddess.

[scott-martin]

Just now, mfbrandi said:

an island to the east

Now word of god IMG. The relationship between Basko or the shadow-of-the-sun, more conventional trolls and whatever they actually do up there on the wild Koromandol coast remains to be explored by those willing to brave that clearly vaginal "pedipalp" standard.

As we know, "documents and oral memories from storm, darkness, and earth cults" converge around the conspiracy of chaos that hatches the devil. And yet here we have an ernalda operating in a different triple act, assisting / facilitating a different birth. Maybe for some people the real devil was time. Maybe for some people the handmaid or "mistress" or midwife isn't the transcendental figure they've developed in Dragon Pass while a dark-derived bug goddess takes the central role. 

For that matter the two dads may or may not be the same figure in different phases of his career or seen from different perspectives. But this is probably veering into the dumb theory zone.

[dumuzid]

I reckon she died about the same time that Argan Argar escorted Esrola into the Underworld

[scott-martin]

6 minutes ago, Eff said:

trip attendant

Only '90s kids know.

Arguably there is always something funky lurking just below the surface of the rye . . . some purple grain attached to a grain goddess whose name is a secret, some fungus or amaranth or whatever is better to think and worse to eat. 

Which is IMG where a lot of this fairly recent transcendental Ernalda theology is coming from. In archaic times, she was largely just an earth goddess. More lately, she's consolidated a lot of the high magic that runs the world. That's okay. The once-cosmic spider gets smaller as the (mid)wife gets bigger. And so it goes! If I recall correctly the big reveal on spider woman comes around the point where Greg is talking about his mom and his first marriage. But he changed. The world changed.

One of the things that still excites me is the notion that someone will step up and explore all of this with the same passion and focus that others have thrown into the Orlanth cult over the years. It might still happen but it better not be me in drag.
 

[David Scott]

14 hours ago, Agentorange said:

so......each of the various land/grain goddesses tend to be associated with a particular kind of grain or cereal. Do the lesser known or more obscure grains have their own goddesses. Or is it more the other way round ? That the grains just happens to grow in that goddesses land and that's the association ( if you see what I mean )

You may find this helpful: Grain Goddesses

 

[mfbrandi]

10 hours ago, scott-martin said:

Arguably there is always something funky lurking just below the surface of the rye . . . some purple grain attached to a grain goddess whose name is a secret, some fungus or amaranth or whatever is better to think and worse to eat.

See, ergot and midwifery I get. But fungus seems to point us back to a Darkness midwife. And where there is Darkness, you are sure to find Light–Fire. Is the Aether that burns its way out of Darkness really St. Anthony’s fire? (Anthony … Arachne … but no, that is for another thread.) If in humans ergot can both cause and prevent miscarriage and through vasoconstriction remove limbs, is it too much of a stretch to have it involved in the curse of the kin?

Ernalda in the Well:

Quote

The bountiful mother of life is the source of all sustenance. Reverence for her should stem from every living creature. Plants and animals, both wild and domestic, are her children.

But unless Flamal — a piece of amber preceding trees? — is her child, she doesn’t seem to be an ancestress of Mee Vorala/fungi. As Zorak Zoran ate Flamal, one wonders whether either (a) ZZ is the “true father” of Mee Vorala, or (b) it is through being consumed by ZZ that Flamal got to “mate” with Dame Darkness (ZZ’s “sister”). Either seems to point to ZZ as the author of his own burning/ergotism. Ouch!

When the “dead” gods get up and walk toward the Dawn, are they animated by Mee Vorala? We have had zombie ants here before, but their time underground suggests drugged-up periodic cicadas.

[mfbrandi]

If Belintar’s theory is right and Ginna Jar is the ghost of Ernalda (and if time works before Time and if time travel doesn’t), then Ernalda must die before the other Lightbringers meet Ginna Jar.

Quote

The six
were together when they reached the edge of
the world where the ocean seeped across the
land. Beyond that place, the lap of cold chaos
froze the very stuff of the world. There, upon
the edge of the cosmos, they discovered the
mysterious being called Ginna Jar.
— GtG, p. 121

And if someone suggests that Ginna Jar is Arachne Solara and the ghost of Ernalda, I shall scream.

That’s a lot of ifs. The Spartans wouldn’t be impressed.

And given how unobservant the big O. is (and how happy to monologue into empty space), his wife might have been dead a long time before he set off on his quest.

[Eff]

42 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

If Belintar’s theory is right and Ginna Jar is the ghost of Ernalda (and if time works before Time and if time travel doesn’t), then Ernalda must die before the other Lightbringers meet Ginna Jar.

And if someone suggests that Ginna Jar is Arachne Solara and the ghost of Ernalda, I shall scream.

That’s a lot of ifs. The Spartans wouldn’t be impressed.

And given how unobservant the big O. is (and how happy to monologue into empty space), his wife might have been dead a long time before he set off on his quest.

Of course, a ghost is partially synonymous with a spirit, and there is a little phrase called "the ghost in the machine". Keeping entirely within linear time and ignoring a certain topic which was quite hastily chopped out of this thread, there is still quite some uncertainty here. Then again, if Ernalda's body is the earth and the soil and the rock, such that the cleft of the Ezel temple is the gap of her vulva, her wandering spirit, her ginna-jar, is what she probably uses to interact with the world the vast majority of the time. 

[Agentorange]

8 hours ago, David Scott said:

You may find this helpful: Grain Goddesses

 

Thank you !