When exactly does Ernalda die ?

[scott-martin]

1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

big O

All right, Lacan. Let's go.

The most archaic published version of the LBQ we have (RQ2, expanded for Cults of Prax) is oedipal / adolescent / adventurous, making no mention of the god being married at all . . . no bride rivalry, zero cult association with "Ernalda" (this is reserved at this stage for the Bull), and only the "sweet green woman" obligation on wind lords even hints at any kind of courtship. She just isn't there. Instead the motivation for the quest is generational: the Big O (we have come to terms) sets out to redeem his parents from the literal sins of the fathers and the crimes perpetuated on the mothers.

We could be forgiven for reading this version of the myth as being experienced "before" the O+E hierogamy was established at all, either developmentally in terms of the characters or historically in terms of the way the cults have evolved within Time. This is also the version that prevailed before the once-open signifier "Ginna Jar" was fixed . . . whoever compiled Cults of Prax (Biturian Varosh himself?) either thinks they're proposing a revolutionary new hypothesis by equating this figure with both ghost Glorantha and the living Arachne Solara or is too coy (ritually constrained) to simply assert it as fact.

Either scenario is interesting. However, Ernalda remains neither absent nor present but simply not considered relevant at this stage. She isn't a factor. It isn't her story. If I recall correctly, this is the status quo in the somewhat fragmentary Harmast materials we have. Harmast is no stranger to women and how to satisfy their mythic prerogatives, but his quest isn't what I'd call a romantic rescue mission and there's no shadowy female figure pulling the strings. By the time you get back to Cults of Prax, the ginna jar only appears at the brink of the world and is sometimes even a dude.

I spent decades working with the ginna jar as a sort of moveable ritual feast or sliding symbol that could be redefined to fit personal circumstances. This was "the crack" in the system that "lets the light get in," to quote one of our airplane crews in recent weeks. It was how the cosmos, broken or otherwise, somehow manages to ensure that a sufficiently advanced quest team "gets what it needs." The handshake of the sign.

And that worked for a few decades. But the sign itself cried out for a handshake and smart people worked really hard to fix the open signifier. The Cults of Prax compiler is part of this process. Some time between that book (1615-7?) and the Gloranthan now, people decided to promulgate the identification of the "ghost" in the ginna jar machine with Ernalda, and from there since the ghost is also the spider it's a short associative hop to identify Ernalda with the cosmic spider. 

This is okay. Signs are by their nature always opening and closing. Belintar or some more contemporary "pseudo-Belintar" is right to make these associations as long as they get you where you need to go. Maybe before the seasonal narrative of Ernalda was a separate entity, neither absent nor present nor relevant to the LBQ. At a certain point she steps in to fill the deliberately empty sign. We can read this as adventurous growing up a little. Or we can shake off a "false" close, stay on the quest and see where it ultimately takes us. As mentioned up thread, I'm thrilled to see the earth complex get some agency, even if it's topping from the bottom.

What are the politics at stake? "Glorantha" is the cosmic mother favored among the Pelorians. Ripping her name out of the weave is probably a priority in the wake of the Red Earth schism. The spider's cult center is local to Dragon Pass so it's harder to cut her. But you can insert the local rival to the cosmic mother and see if everything holds together . . . a sort of new age goddess switch as it were.

Edited January 13, 2023 by scott-martin
plot seed

[scott-martin]

15 minutes ago, Eff said:

the cleft of the Ezel temple is the gap of her vulva

Is this not an imperfectly screened recollection of the Dora mysteries?

[Jeff]

7 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

All right, Lacan. Let's go.

The most archaic published version of the LBQ we have (RQ2, expanded for Cults of Prax) is oedipal / adolescent / adventurous, making no mention of the god being married at all . . . no bride rivalry, zero cult association with "Ernalda" (this is reserved at this stage for the Bull), and only the "sweet green woman" obligation on wind lords even hints at any kind of courtship. She just isn't there. Instead the motivation for the quest is generational: the Big O (we have come to terms) sets out to redeem his parents from the literal sins of the fathers and the crimes perpetuated on the mothers.

We could be forgiven for reading this version of the myth as being experienced "before" the O+E hierogamy was established at all, either developmentally in terms of the characters or historically in terms of the way the cults have evolved within Time. This is also the version that prevailed before the once-open signifier "Ginna Jar" was fixed . . . whoever compiled Cults of Prax (Biturian Varosh himself?) either thinks they're proposing a revolutionary new hypothesis by equating this figure with both ghost Glorantha and the living Arachne Solara or is too coy (ritually constrained) to simply assert it as fact.

Either scenario is interesting. However, Ernalda remains neither absent nor present but simply not considered relevant at this stage. She isn't a factor. It isn't her story. If I recall correctly, this is the status quo in the somewhat fragmentary Harmast materials we have. Harmast is no stranger to women and how to satisfy their mythic prerogatives, but his quest isn't what I'd call a romantic rescue mission and there's no shadowy female figure pulling the strings. By the time you get back to Cults of Prax, the ginna jar only appears at the brink of the world and is sometimes even a dude.

I spent decades working with the ginna jar as a sort of moveable ritual feast or sliding symbol that could be redefined to fit personal circumstances. This was "the crack" in the system that "lets the light get in," to quote one of our airplane crews in recent weeks. It was how the cosmos, broken or otherwise, somehow manages to ensure that a sufficiently advanced quest team "gets what it needs." The handshake of the sign.

And that worked for a few decades. But the sign itself cried out for a handshake and smart people worked really hard to fix the open signifier. The Cults of Prax compiler is part of this process. Some time between that book (1615-7?) and the Gloranthan now, people decided to promulgate the identification of the "ghost" in the ginna jar machine with Ernalda, and from there since the ghost is also the spider it's a short associative hop to identify Ernalda with the cosmic spider. 

This is okay. Signs are by their nature always opening and closing. Belintar or some more contemporary "pseudo-Belintar" is right to make these associations as long as they get you where you need to go. Maybe before the seasonal narrative of Ernalda was a separate entity, neither absent nor present nor relevant to the LBQ. At a certain point she steps in to fill the deliberately empty sign. We can read this as adventurous growing up a little. Or we can shake off a "false" close, stay on the quest and see where it ultimately takes us. As mentioned up thread, I'm thrilled to see the earth complex get some agency, even if it's topping from the bottom.




--

Ernalda is often associated with Gina Jar. So is Glorantha herself. 

Gina Jar is the ghost of something important that has been lost and is gone. The Orlanthi give it a feminine identity, but that may have as much to do with the sleeping Earth goddess before the Sacred Time as anything else. 

In short she's a mystery element in the ceremony. If WE mortals are Flesh Man, Gina Jar is our lost dreams, love and hopes..

[Bohemond]

On 1/11/2023 at 7:00 PM, Qizilbashwoman said:

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

That's EXACTLY what I was imagining. She's wearing a fedora and carrying a bullwhip but still looking fresh and cute...

[Bohemond]

On 1/11/2023 at 6:29 PM, Eff said:

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.)

I'm not familiar with this 'first confrontation with Nontraya and ZZ' that you mention. Do you have a source or a specific myth for this? I'm really trying to flesh out Ernalda's mythology for my campaign. 

[Agentorange]

You know sometimes when I read the esoterica in these discussions, I'm put in mind of the  stories of ancient Rome,  where behind each speaker of obscure esoteric theory there was a slave quietly whispering:

" Memento suus iustus ludem "

Edited January 14, 2023 by Agentorange

[Eff]

3 hours ago, Bohemond said:

I'm not familiar with this 'first confrontation with Nontraya and ZZ' that you mention. Do you have a source or a specific myth for this? I'm really trying to flesh out Ernalda's mythology for my campaign. 

I made that up on the spot, because Zorak Zoran and Nontraya are parts of the myth of Babeester Gor's emergence and Ernalda's death/slumber, so if you want a Babeester myth cycle where her creation takes place earlier, you need to displace them back earlier into myth-time. There is nothing from "canon" or existing texts that it is referring to beyond that. 

[mfbrandi]

4 hours ago, scott-martin said:

people decided to promulgate the identification of the "ghost" in the ginna jar machine with Ernalda, and from there since the ghost is also the spider it's a short associative hop to identify Ernalda with the cosmic spider.

[This is just a personal view. Few, if any, will have sympathy for it, but here is my plea …]

Of course people will tell different stories — seeming to imply a different nature and character — about what is ostensibly the same god. Some bright Gloranthan spark probably thought supreme nature deity = Ernalda, supreme nature deity = the Sunspider, so alakazam! -> Ernalda the Magician.

That is fine as far as it goes, I guess, and maybe we can even tell the “she gets Orlanth to kill Yelm” story in a way that doesn’t have her pouting and batting her eyes at the big O. But really, why bother? If you want AS to be behind the killing of Yelm — it is all part of the grand plan, after all — you can have the Spider manipulating/sock-puppetting Ernalda, or as noted you can motivate the killing without bringing the green one into it, at all. You can motivate it from ego or politics or likely half-a-dozen other things. And let’s face it, the actions in a myth don’t have to make much sense psychologically, anyway. (The end result should resonate, but I reckon that probably doesn’t need well-motivated characters. Certainly not deep ones.)

I have this horrible feeling — please let me be wrong — that the creep of Cosmic Girl Ernalda has something to do with some earthman’s need to have the perfect bountiful wife also secretly be the monstrous manipulative spider who is eventually going to toss all her husbands to Wakboth as snackfood. (And there is a non-zero chance that Wakboth is an aspect of the Spider.) “My wife, she caught me in her web, and she sucked me dry.” How absolutely charming!

Now, the implacable Spider playing her cosmic game, to whom even divine Kings and Emperors are less than pawns — her I like. (There are other, smaller Arachnes. I like them, too. They needn’t trouble us here.) And she is a plausible nature goddess, who would happily extinguish all of our culture if it got in the way. But Ernalda — who represents culture: agriculture, marriage, feeding the tribe — seems to represent the domestication of nature, i.e. to be its enemy. Frankly, she gives me the dry heaves. Do we really want to yoke them together as one god? The divine Spider slumming it with the endoskeletal softbodies?

I can see some Ernalda cultists would want to tell it that way, in the long tradition of latecoming gods claiming the status, power, position, and even identity of their predecessors. Plus, out of fear, they might want to put a friendly green “human” mask on a sometimes hostile eight-eyed, hairy-legged cosmos. They might want to see it that way, but do we want to inhabit their POV? I don’t, but I have a weak stomach.

“But Ernalda needs toughening up, lest she seem like a manipulative housewife.” Maybe, maybe not — I am probably not the right person to judge, as I would happily see the Spider squish her with a rolled-up newspaper (even before the 3rd Age endgame). But if she did, there are all those other earth goddesses — some of whom are quite tough already — and we could make a case for them all being aspects of her, the owner of the earth rune. It is almost as if, having “outsourced” her less “attractive” aspects to “sisters” and other “relatives”, her only move to seem important again is to claim to have secretly been the supreme being all along.

But it is late, I am not going to get any more coherent, and I should probably have stopped some time ago. I did say I would scream. I think you were testing me. 😉

[Eff]

I think that the spider woman will always be there blowing kisses as long as things don't get damnatio memoriae enough to erase her presence. The elevation and centralization of Ernalda is of course easily psychoanalyzed- if you've gotten hierogamized to the notions of active and passive principles, all bursting with gender, then what better way to avoid the contradictions of making Ernalda permanently play catcher when you can clearly see her pitching in this grainy video of a 1977 Red Sox game than to make her the world itself? She can't act on anything because there is nothing to act on which is not her. That this process makes star pitcher Orlanth the rightful lord of the universe and resolves the agonizing tensions of that board game with the Androgeus and the free dinosaurs for the taking, the possibility of getting your perfect doomstack wiped out by something as asinine as a good roll taking out Ethilrist, triggering a Doom Run, and then Keener Than is entirely out of position; well, that's a benefit (never mind the hazard).

From all of this, the fear of entropy is obvious in origin, and so entropy becomes the great enemy that all acknowledge as such, except for that powergamer in the cheap seats with the red hair who keeps making out with her latest girlfriend.

With all of that said, the spider accepted the powergamer, and her hand (or her pedipalp) holds back any assertion of "rocks fall, everyone dies". So it goes.

What does Ernalda think about all this? The last time I asked her she just started laughing.

Edited January 14, 2023 by Eff

[scott-martin]

13 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

probably thought supreme nature deity = Ernalda

Moving to the other thread to avoid stinking things up here. And timeshifting it since this will require at least a brief search of the lower stacks so we can really talk about the spider . . . and technically I have yet to close the markets for the week. Tomorrow and tomorrow. But I think it's not so bad.

[mfbrandi]

In those parts of Glorantha that have no winter to speak of, does she die at all? Have the people who live there even heard of her?

[mfbrandi]

16 hours ago, Agentorange said:

" Memento suus iustus ludem "

Posting esoterica is itself just a game, you are right. But I long ago fed all my slaves to the Bat; it’s the abolitionist in me.

And — whisper it — I am not the only one to simply make it up as they go along.

If I ever claim to be the canon police and to have had hadith dictated to me by the shade of someone who once sat next to Greg Stafford, just take me out and shoot me.

[Agentorange]

14 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

Posting esoterica is itself just a game, you are right. But I long ago fed all my slaves to the Bat; it’s the abolitionist in me.

And — whisper it — I am not the only one to simply make it up as they go along.

If I ever claim to be the canon police and to have had hadith dictated to me by the shade of someone who once sat next to Greg Stafford, just take me out and shoot me.

We shall shoot you with an arrow made of Mistletoe to remain mythically sound 😄

[mfbrandi]

19 hours ago, Jeff said:

In short she's a mystery element in the ceremony. If WE mortals are Flesh Man, Gina Jar is our lost dreams, love and hopes.

So the ghost of the Cosmos cannot hope to be more than the bits of ourselves that we have lost down the back of the sofa? That is some anthropocentric universe.

(Alternatively, maybe, she has stored our lost dreams, love, and hopes in her void, but who knows what if anything she will do with them? Perhaps she will eat them. Perhaps she will use them to decorate her web — as lures? Perhaps she will return them to us when we most need them … or most need to avoid them. Perhaps she has forgotten them, already.)

[soltakss]

On 1/11/2023 at 9:32 PM, 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 ?

She dies in the Greater Darkness and returns at the Dawn.

Also, she dies before the Great Winter and returns after it, in the 1620s.