Arachne Solara

[Qizilbashwoman]

6 minutes ago, David Scott said:

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

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

i never want to see vaginal pedipalps ever again, David Scott

[mfbrandi]

8 minutes ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

i never want to see vaginal pedipalps ever again, David Scott

It is a hideous bit of iconography. At least a centaur is not subjected to having its human bit appear out of the top of a horse’s head.

More dignified to have her appear as a spider mostly and a woman when absolutely necessary (sometimes with extra human arms) — not that kack-handed cut-and-shut. This is the greatest of the great gods we’re depicting here. Show a little respect. 😉

[Eff]

3 hours ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

i never want to see vaginal pedipalps ever again, David Scott

When you think about the function of pedipalps for a spider, doesn't that make Gorgorma and Arachne S clearly deeply connected, simpatico on a primal level? 

Anyways, given the origin of the A. Solara imagery, I can't help but feel much about her, appearance or otherwise, is a prank. On whom by whom, I don't know. 

[mfbrandi]

3 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

that clearly vaginal "pedipalp" standard

I confess that that other thread had me thinking Gustave Courbet with spiders, but we should all be spared that!

[scott-martin]

2 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

I confess that that other thread had me thinking Gustave Courbet with spiders, but we should all be spared that!

Greg has written at length about his troubled relationship with the spider mother, let me see if I can find it unless someone has it at hand. "We" tend to imagine her benign for some reason, perhaps reaction formation on display.

[Eff]

21 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

Greg has written at length about his troubled relationship with the spider mother, let me see if I can find it unless someone has it at hand. "We" tend to imagine her benign for some reason, perhaps reaction formation on display.

Just as we must imagine Sisyphus a happy man... 

A crackpot belief I have here is that there's a subconscious hope that by buttering her up she will bless us, or a subconscious sense that if we define her as benevolent, we will find a Glorantha that has a gentle or benevolent metaphysics. Like blowing on the dice for luck, in a way. For my part, of course, I have personal experience to guide me in a similar but not identical direction. 

[scott-martin]

9 minutes ago, Eff said:

we must imagine Sisyphus a happy man

Now as a human-presenting Ernalda takes over as holder of the skein from the atavistic + at best ambivalent spider woman, what happens?

[mfbrandi]

3 hours ago, scott-martin said:

"We" tend to imagine her benign for some reason, perhaps reaction formation on display.

I imagine her as exactly as benign as Zorak Zoran … and I like spiders.

[mfbrandi]

2 hours ago, Eff said:

a subconscious hope that by buttering her up she will bless us, or a subconscious sense that if we define her as benevolent, we will find a Glorantha that has a gentle or benevolent metaphysics

But surely it is the Orlanth–Ernalda complex — like us but more annoying — that we seek to butter up. That is not religion — that is toadying and politics.

Arachne is a superpowered spider — possibly she was bitten by a radioactive high-school student — who sometimes dresses up in a human costume. You cannot deal with fate. Fate doesn’t care. Fate has its own agenda.

She gave us back the sun (her — just ignore the blonde beardy guy) — yay! — but she also gave us time (which is the devil and also her), and time will eat us all — also yay! but with a little trepidation? And in time, the sun may eat … everything? The Sunspider giveth, and the Sunspider taketh away. Suns burn planets and spiders suck out your insides. She has destroyed civilizations and will bin the rest of the gods. Blessed are the ways of the Sunspider.

That’s a proper god. Who wants a god that’s like us but blown up to the size of a barrage balloon and painted blue or green? That’s not a god, that is a bouncy castle.

[Eff]

3 hours ago, scott-martin said:

Now as a human-presenting Ernalda takes over as holder of the skein from the atavistic + at best ambivalent spider woman, what happens?

Uneasy sits the head that wears the Weltgeist-y crown! I suspect that such a situation proves unstable. There might be some rather entertaining wavefunction collapses that come out of it, deeply maternal in their own fashions, but the benefit of AS is that the kiss of the spider woman usually only comes if you draw her attention. You can typically opt in and maybe opt out, assuming you've got a trip attendant and maybe a good excuse to tell poison control. Can the jolly green giantess keep that aloof face?

[Wheel Shield]

The link in the original post comes back with a “403 Forbidden” error message. Was the image removed because of this post?

[mfbrandi]

5 hours ago, Wheel Shield said:

“403 Forbidden” error message. Was the image removed because of this post?

I have seen that error, too, but try the same link again — the picture is there. You have probably seen it before, anyway.

[Scotty]

This one?

[Wheel Shield]

Oh yes. Weird that error. Thank you for the reply.

23 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

I have seen that error, too, but try the same link again — the picture is there. You have probably seen it before, anyway.

 

[mfbrandi]

20 hours ago, Joerg said:

formed from the web of Arachne Solara (which is regurgitated, somewhat digested Devil, as we know well)

To me, this suggested a variation on the familiar creation myth in which a monster/giant/dragon is killed and dismembered to create the world: Arachne Solara/Glorantha uses all of her body to create her web/the cosmos, that is why Glorantha is dead and Arachne Solara is only a ghost. The act of creation is looped, echoing, and/or eternal.

This primal act of creation is sometimes seen as the utuma of the cosmic dragon, sometimes as the devil causing the Spike to explode killing Glorantha, sometimes as the ritual of the net. Finally, we get to lean on the non-sequential nature of Godtime. It is all the same event.

The world is the flesh of the devil.

And if the world, the flesh, and the devil are the “implacable enemies of the soul” then it is just a matter of the remnants of Glorantha fighting it out: dead lizard bits versus ghostly arthropod. A Gloranthan only ever fights herself. But if you are cosmos and void, a little solipsism is forgivable.

But what kind of people would tell the story this way? Are they a gloomy lot, or the cheeriest inhabitants of the lozenge?

[Eff]

4 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

To me, this suggested a variation on the familiar creation myth in which a monster/giant/dragon is killed and dismembered to create the world: Arachne Solara/Glorantha uses all of her body to create her web/the cosmos, that is why Glorantha is dead and Arachne Solara is only a ghost. The act of creation is looped, echoing, and/or eternal.

Glorantha is Glorantha. What would it mean for her to use all of her body and there still to be a lozenge at the end of it? Of course, with that Jungian Cosmic Man archetype, there's a straightforward problem that dogs us down to the present day and the realm of scientific cosmology- what is "nothing"? The disassembly of Ymir or Pangu is the culmination of a process that doesn't begin with vacuum or absence, but with formlessness, incoherence. The infinite cold of Niflheimr and the infinite heat of Muspelheimr meet and create Ymir and Audumbla. The formless mass of generic stuff coalesces into an egg, separates into yin and yang, and the interplay of the two generates Pangu.

The world was chaotic waters, and the breath/wind/spirit of YHVH moved on the face of the waters and made the earth from them. Izanagi and Izanami, youngest of the generations of primordial gods, churn the gelatinous oil-slick of the earth with a jewelled spear from heaven, and then the salt drying from the brine makes the first island. The universe expands from a singularity to its current state over some time between 10 and 20 billion years.

In all of this, there are transformations and transmutations, but the connection to the primordial state of disorganization remains. The aesir have their shameful connection to the autofertilization of Ymir, the Four Heavenly Beasts aid Pangu in growing to encompass the world and remain to this day, the great serpents of the chaotic waters remain in their depths to this day, and the ways of the underworld and of the dead were the way they are before Izanami died. The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation glows for those who have eyes to see wavelengths in the single-digit millimeters. 

So what would death mean in such an exalted context? What kind of transformation is that, if we take it that Glorantha is dead?

And a followup question: in all of these mythologies, there is a primordial multiplicity of entities. Even Ein Sof is an unstable state that condenses to produce the separate tzimtzum, the conceptual space of differentiation of selfhood. Who was hanging with Glorantha/AS when she organized herself into the basic lozengitudinal shape?

 

[Darius West]

On 1/17/2023 at 5:12 AM, Eff said:

Who was hanging with Glorantha/AS when she organized herself into the basic lozengitudinal shape?

Four corners, four sides, eight legs, Lozenge.  Just add spider goddess and her adhesive webs.

[Darius West]

I think Arachne Solara likely has the most in common with the Egyptian deity Neith.  Neith is the preparer of ways, and a primordial goddess whose weaving is associated with spiders.  Similarly Arachne Solara keeps the Sun in his course in the sky, keeps the dead on their path to the underworld, and created the compass rose of the directions and even the Lozenge itself with her eight legs and the weaving of her web.  She is the wyter of the world, but arguably all deities might be wyters at some fundamental level, but they gain new powers every time they cross some arbitrary total of adherents giving them POW and MP.  Most importanty however she is the devourer of Entropy and the Mother of Time.   Darkness was the first Element, and it is therefore no surprise that the primordial goddess of Glorantha is connected with the spider goddess Aranea, who carries the Fate and Darkness Runes, especially as the Fate Rune is described as Arachne Solara's Web.  

But there is a mystery there... Why does the Fate Rune have six legs not eight?  I ask you to look at the Luck Rune.  It has 4 "legs", but if you flip a duplicate Luck Rune upside down and combine them, they forms a Fate Rune as four of its legs become two.  Good Luck plus Bad Luck (Luck Rune inverted)=Fate.

Is Arachne Solara benign?  I suppose the answer depends on how much you enjoy living in her world. Your Answers May Vary.

[Joerg]

On 1/16/2023 at 7:12 PM, Eff said:

Who was hanging with Glorantha/AS when she organized herself into the basic lozengitudinal shape?

Glorantha was hanging out with the Elder Gods, including Grower and Maker, when she had herself organized into the spherical bulge in an endless plane shape adjacent to but separated from the formless Void feeding the Chaosium on the lower end and the Source of energies on the upper end. The lozengitudinal shape is just the limit for the Earth-based Gloranthan denizens, whether mortal or immortal, formed by Ga the primal Earth inside the seas of Zaramaka before climbing up on the (emergent? already present?) Spike. Upon breaking free of the surface seas, Aether, already formed in the darkness of Ga's womb, ascended above, giving substance taken from the Chaosium to the upper hemisphere extending way beyond the limits of the lozenge, above the plain of Sramak's River which formed a local eddy in that possibly infinite plane of storm-beaten water surface with hints of darkness below and fire (lightning?) above.

That infinite plane may not have been part of the original Glorantha, but may have escaped upon the Birth of Umath, creating a pressure valve for extraneous Creation to disperse in the outer limits of that eddy. I would depict Glorantha roughly Saturn-shaped from the outside. The closer you come to the sky domes related to the Inner World, the more you get into weird "surface" realms on that structure, like the Draconic outer realms stacked towards the Source, and possibly other such mystical stepping realms towards the Ultimate, too. That outer plane may not be part of Godtime, either, although it would be part of Creation.

Ragnaglar and his spouses were illuminated when the Storm Bull cast them out of the Godtime cosmos, which may have allowed them to cling to these outer mystical realms, which they descended or ascended to force their re-entry into Godtime from the north, where Shargash/Tolat had weakened the cosmos by crashing Umath into that pillar. They had to enter the Spike in order to reach past the Chaosium and bring in the Void, wounding Glorantha badly.

The wounded cosmic goddess summoned her avatar, the Solar Spider, possibly from the kernel of togetherness that was Ginna Jar, and roped in all the remaining fragments of the Inner World's Godtime. Much had been lost to entropy, possibly shrinking a once vast Godtime world into the dimensions of the reclaimed world of the Gray Age and the Dawn. It is entirely possible that there are shards of Godtime that remained outside of the mundane Inner World after this reconstruction, and it is possible that the Thaw in Fronela or the ascendance of the Red Goddess brought back some of these, in case of Fronela and Brithos as a wedge-shaped insertion pushing the coastline about 30 degrees to the west. possibly re-instating some Vadeli lands, and in case of the Red Goddess providing portions of the Lunar surface. Other such shards may still be folded away from normal topography, some accessible through narrow overlapping boundaries. Inner Dorastor on the Rockwood Watershed connects to a vast range of chaos-infested intermediate realities connecting Kartolin Castle with Arkat's Last Tower across the pass road according to Sandy Petersen's Secrets of Glorantha.

[mfbrandi]

2 hours ago, Darius West said:

But there is a mystery there... Why does the Fate Rune have six legs not eight?

Because none of us met and lived to tell the tale, so we assumed she looked like her daughters.

Spoiler

The Great Compromise is not “Cosmos eats Chaos” but “Chaos eats Cosmos … but she promises to do so slowly.”

: for every arm an equal and opposite arm — cancel to zero. is unbalanced and represents the spontaneous generation of something from nothing/the void/primal chaos. Once Cosmos has been consumed, Luck may restart the cycle.

Quote

This creature’s true name is still unknown. She is also known as the Waiting Mouth, the Hungry One, and the Devouring Mother. She invaded Glorantha with the Devil and fed on the refuse of the universe. — Well of Daliath

Quote

[S]he does not respond to prayers and appeals. She appears when and where she desires. The results of her presence are sometimes benevolent and generous, at other times cruel and terrifying, but usually neutral and natural. She eats anything she catches in her web. — Well of Daliath

The Devil: speak his name and he will appear. That just shows what a low-grade, illusory fellow he is — all smoke and mirrors. He is our fear and our willful misunderstanding of what is really going on. He is not there; he never was; poof! And we come to, caught in the web of fate.

Arachne puppeteers the gods onto her web, trusses them up — they are not holding the web, the web is holding them: that is how it is with fate — but generously agrees not to eat them all right now. That is Time, the Great Compromise. And if that is not the story the Lightbringer priests tell, well, what kind of a god would say “worship me, o mortals, for I am … cosmic snack food”? Not the big blue blowhard.

Arachne Solara’s web holds us all. The gods have but a short time left. Then it is our hour in the sun. But sooner or later, our threads will be reeled in and we will feed our Mother.

So we could see Arachne as Cosmos and Krarsht as Chaos, but Billy Ockham says that is one Devouring Mother too many.

Edited February 4, 2023 by mfbrandi
[]

[David Scott]

2 hours ago, Darius West said:

Why does the Fate Rune have six legs not eight?

Because it's a web, not legs.

[mfbrandi]

On 1/12/2023 at 9:48 PM, scott-martin said:

Now as a human-presenting Ernalda takes over as holder of the skein from the atavistic + at best ambivalent spider woman, what happens?

More misdirection, another POV trick: are you truly holding the thing to which your hand is glued? Still, she looks like a fairly substantial spider snack. The move from Ernalda the Naked Lunch to Ernalda the Weaver is a reversal of perspective characteristic of mortals’ refusal of “the frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.” Given that we are all spider food, one can have a little sympathy for the Ernaldans — but only a little — and it is not as if the Krarsht cultists are any less self-deceptive.

[Ormi Phengaria]

Arachne Solara is also more often 6 + 2 (two arms, six legs, or six arms, two legs) when interacted with. She's still eight--particularly when sideways--, but two Powers are distinguished from the rest, and my further guess is that their union produces . Consider Asrelia's association.

(And when presented as both spider and woman in iconography, she has 10, 8+2. Lists of ten Powers have previously been made with no agreement as to what fills them. Sometimes it's Law and Chaos, sometimes Luck and Fate, sometimes it's other even less common runes. Whatever the choice, though, it probably represents the highest polarity in itself, the Twins.)

Edited February 4, 2023 by Ormi Phengaria

[Rodney Dangerduck]

Somewhat OT, but a few months ago Jeff posted a list of Major and Minor gods.

Every single member of our long timer RQ gaming group was shocked that Arachne Solara made neither list.  Hopefully there was a typo or misunderstanding somewhere.

 

[Bill the barbarian]

16 minutes ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

Somewhat OT, but a few months ago Jeff posted a list of Major and Minor gods.

Every single member of our long timer RQ gaming group was shocked that Arachne Solara made neither list.  Hopefully there was a typo or misunderstanding somewhere.

 

I have never considered her to be  god or goddess. Nope, since finding out about her in '83 I have always considered her not to be a deity, or more powerful than them but beyond them. 

ETA

Not akin to them.

 

Edited February 5, 2023 by Bill the barbarian