Real-world Inspirations

[Qizilbashwoman]

 I'd like to make a list of good real-world inspirations we can use for Glorantha. Here's an article called Drums, Hearts, Bulls, and Dead Gods: The Theology of the Ancient Mesopotamian Kettledrum. I'd like to recommend this for Storm Bull worship!

https://www.academia.edu/37304751/Drums_Hearts_Bulls_and_Dead_Gods_The_Theology_of_the_Ancient_Mesopotamian_Kettledrum?email_work_card=title

[SDLeary]

Academia.edu has lots of excellent papers!

Id also like to put forward two YouTube channels: Esoterica and Crecganford. 

Esoterica is about the Western faith, philosophical, and magic traditions. They have an interesting recent cast on Yahweh, his origins and ultimate merging with El, among many others.

Crecganford broadens things out a bit to cover (mostly)PIE, mainly focusing on comparative mythology and folklore, with some deeper dives into particular cultures. Also tying things into cultures on the periphery of the PIE world where cross pollination can be shown to have occurred.

SDLeary

Edited March 23, 2023 by SDLeary

[Eff]

Two book-length studies of real-world mythology:

https://www.amazon.com/Prolonged-Echoes-Medieval-Northern-Collection/dp/8778380081/ref=sr_1_18?qid=1679583287&refinements=p_27%3AMargaret+Clunies+Ross&s=books&sr=1-18
 

https://www.amazon.com/Old-Enemy-Neil-Forsyth/dp/0691014744/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=the+old+enemy+satan+and+the+combat+myth&qid=1679583525&s=books&sprefix=the+old+enemy+sata%2Cstripbooks%2C108&sr=1-1

Prolonged Echoes talks at length about the interrelations between the cosmological vision of Norse mythology and how that interrelates to sexual anxieties and power dynamics in Norse society. 

The Old Enemy tracks the development and reappropriation of a particular mytheme or mythological motif and how its meaning transformed, emerging from the same basic elements. 

Both are very inspirational for interacting with mythology generally and thinking through its possibilities and convolutions. 

A film:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083931/

Fehérlófia/Son of the White Mare takes stories from Hungarian folklore and presents them in a gorgeously stylized fantasy... with mysterious appearances of apparent modernity. It's got Sun Horse stuff in it, of course, but it also does the Glorantha thing that you experience when you encounter Bob's Bison Burgers- the sudden intrusion of the anachronistic without the out of farce. 

[Bill the barbarian]

4 hours ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

 I'd like to make a list of good real-world inspirations we can use for Glorantha. Here's an article called Drums, Hearts, Bulls, and Dead Gods: The Theology of the Ancient Mesopotamian Kettledrum. I'd like to recommend this for Storm Bull worship!

https://www.academia.edu/37304751/Drums_Hearts_Bulls_and_Dead_Gods_The_Theology_of_the_Ancient_Mesopotamian_Kettledrum?email_work_card=title

Here are two for you...
1/ https://orbis.stanford.edu
this is ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World reconstructs the time cost and financial expense associated with a wide range of different types of travel in antiquity. 

though iron age and Roman this has been invaluable over the years for me!

2/ https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/ancient-mesopotamia-life-in-the-cradle-of-civilization

this is so great, but the fact the professor giving the lectures played bass with the bangles before they called themselves the bangles also rocks!

 

ETA
and if you have Kanopy the score or so videos (as are all the Great Courses) are free! If you do not have Kanopy, ask your library to consider getting it (making it also free).

 

 

 

Edited March 23, 2023 by Bill the barbarian

[Erol of Backford]

Once in a while I pull out this old friend... its not a consuming as the Rise and Fall but has some nice bits here and there on art and culture.

https://www.roundtablebooks.com/product/1919/Past-Worlds-HarperCollins-Atlas-of-Archaeology

Prisoners of Geography is also nice though not based in ancient times but yet give as nice summary of how certain features, rivers, mountains, etc shaped how civilizations grew. Makes me think of Russia wanting a warm water port as do the Lunars?

[Bill the barbarian]

Some nice stuff to go exploring in!

May I make a personal note. It is nice to see folk choosing a couple of items to share rather than (info) dumping down 4,325,875.54378 items and looking quite proud of one's self while doing it. This allows all a share of sharing... sounds nice, eh?

Edited March 24, 2023 by Bill the barbarian

[svensson]

I like to use photos to illustrate scenery for my faux-Atlantis game, especially to give a sense of technology and architecture.

Some of the photos from my illustrations folder

 

[Yēlm-ašarēd]

I can recommend a number of papers, including The Religious Dimension of Copper Metallurgy in the Southern Levant by Nissim Amzallag; this tome proffers a lot of fertile ideas for metallurgical cults not just in Glorantha, but in any other bronze or iron age world you might be using or writing. Ahmad Al-Jallad's The Religion and Rituals of the Nomads of Pre-Islamic Arabia and his other works on detailing pre-Islamic Arab beliefs are also interesting.

I also understand that not everyone likes to read dry books like these. Irving Finkel's lectures on ancient Mesopotamia are a valued resource. Here is a lecture on magic that you can potentially use for inspiration in rituals:

Finally, from what I understand he has a historical fiction book set in ancient Assyria. I've not had the chance to read it, but that probably has a lot of insight too. Here's a link to it if anyone's interested.

[Bren]

13 hours ago, svensson said:

Some of the photos from my illustrations folder

 

I have those same two pictures in my folder of Minoan images. Here are two others from my folders. The second one seems like a nice look for ladies in Nochet.

Edited March 24, 2023 by Bren

[EricW]

The Shield of Time and other time patrol books by Poul Anderson.

Beautiful descriptions of historical settings and a surprisingly Gloranthan feel considering it’s a time travel book.

If you consider the distant future god like Danielans, who set up the time patrol, intervening to protect history as soon as time travel was invented, and journeys into the past as heroquests into myth which affect the present, then you will see why I say this.

And of course, the stories have several cases where the future is overthrown by criminals, or one disturbing case where the future just collapsed by itself, and had to be reconstructed.

Edited March 25, 2023 by EricW

[svensson]

46 minutes ago, EricW said:

The Shield of Time and other time patrol books by Poul Anderson.

Beautiful descriptions of historical settings and a surprisingly Gloranthan feel considering it’s a time travel book.

If you consider the distant future god like Danielans, who set up the time patrol, intervening to protect history as soon as time travel was invented, and journeys into the past as heroquests into myth which affect the present, then you will see why I say this.

And of course, the stories have several cases where the future is overthrown by criminals, or one disturbing case where the future just collapsed by itself, and had to be reconstructed.

I'll have to take a look at that.

[svensson]

This image, from wikipedia commons, just came up today and seems singularly appropriate to the discussion.

Aerial top-down view of the Central Shrine of the Somapura Mahavari temple complex, Naogaon Bangladesh.

World UNESCO site 1985

 

Edited March 26, 2023 by svensson

[mfbrandi]

5 hours ago, svensson said:

Aerial top-down view of the Central Shrine of the Somapura Mahavari temple complex, Naogaon Bangladesh. World UNESCO site 1985

For ease of reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somapura_Mahavihara

And the UNESCO listing: https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/322/

It is a Buddhist monastery/university from the 8th Century CE (Wikipedia) and “a renowned intellectual centre until the 17th century” (UNESCO), apparently.

Clearly part of Nysalor’s Cry for Institutes of Higher Education.

[Qizilbashwoman]

Sabanabelagola ("white pond of the renunciate") is one of the greatest Jain pilgrimmage sites (tirthas) in the world, built possibly as early as the reign of Ashoka (third century BCE). Tirthas are generally on mountaintops and have incredible stone-cut architecture:

For the uninitiated, Jainism is like... nonviolent extremist Buddhism? It isn't Buddhism but it is similar, but believes that there is an eternal self that is tarnished by violence and only rather extreme forms of self-deprivation can purify sins. Jains are somewhat famous in that one of its schools has naked renunciates, the "skyclad".

Jains are an amazing community, incidentally. One of my favorite books on Jainism is called Framing the Jina, https://www.amazon.com/Framing-Jina-Narratives-Icons-History/dp/0195385020/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gommateshwara_statue#/media/File:Gommateshwara,_Shravanabelagola.jpg

This is a statue known as the Gommatessara, representing the, uh, I guess you'd say "saint", Bahubali, built in the tenth century

Jain tirthas are exquisite: here's a representational map (i.e. not a scale map) of several of them known as a tirtha pata. Just viewing a tirtha pata is said to remove sin from the soul.

[Qizilbashwoman]

On 3/23/2023 at 11:08 PM, Yēlm-ašarēd said:

I can recommend a number of papers, including The Religious Dimension of Copper Metallurgy in the Southern Levant by Nissim Amzallag; this tome proffers a lot of fertile ideas for metallurgical cults not just in Glorantha, but in any other bronze or iron age world you might be using or writing. Ahmad Al-Jallad's The Religion and Rituals of the Nomads of Pre-Islamic Arabia and his other works on detailing pre-Islamic Arab beliefs are also interesting.

I also understand that not everyone likes to read dry books like these. Irving Finkel's lectures on ancient Mesopotamia are a valued resource. Here is a lecture on magic that you can potentially use for inspiration in rituals

One of my favorite Mesopotamian religious practices from late antiquity are called incantation bowls, which were written in the varieties of Aramaic that were spoken in Mesopotamia. They appear in great numberas demon-trapping devices (for illness and bad mazzal "star sign" - yes, mazl tov basically means "may the stars align" and Ladino malmazal means "bad star sign!") and have all kinds of cross-religious symbols, showing that phrases about Jesus or from the Mishna of Judaism or from Mandaeaism or Manichaeism were used apotropaically (symbolically). They were seemingly created by some kind of religious specialist; you had a problem you asked your local religious person who knew how to work the magic to catch a demon for you.

These are, simply put, demon traps. We've found them in situ: a trap is on the bottom and a second bowl is over it and sealed and the entire device buried. Images of the mallian spirit (lilin) are generally painted in the center, and the practice was made to snare a potential child-killing spirit, migraine demon, plague monster, or curse spirit to protect an individual suffering.

In Nippur, excavations have shown that every single Sasanian Jewish residence before Islam had a full trap buried in it, suggesting it represented a kind of preemptive charm when housebuilding, an extraordinarily common practice in cultures across the world.

This image is in Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, and Jewish bowls have quotes from the Torah and from commentaries and rabbis. I don't know what this one says, it might be the common Jewish demon Lilith or the Persian one called Bagdana

This one is in Mandaic Aramaic, the language of the Mandaeans, an now-endangered religious community. It notably is non-representational.

[jajagappa]

13 minutes ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

These are, simply put, demon traps. We've found them in situ: a trap is on the bottom and a second bowl is over it and sealed and the entire device buried.

Wonderful! Definitely going into my Glorantha.

[mfbrandi]

3 hours ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

For the uninitiated, Jainism is like... nonviolent extremist Buddhism?

I am sure you didn’t mean it that way, but this does make it sound like they are a bunch of weirdos. In my experience, they are a lot less odd than I am. My next-door neighbours are Jains, my pharmacist is a Jain, my mother’s fellow district cub scout leader was a Jain (and if memory serves worked for a company which — as well as doing other stuff — made weapons). At a friend’s wedding, the best man described himself as a Buddhist to get out of having to “explain himself” to the assembled rabble; it annoyed me, so imagine how he felt.

Isn’t it true that Jains join the military and (I am sure there are exceptions) accept defensive wars? I don’t say this to knock non-violence or rubber-stamp the use of military force, but isn’t the non-violent extremism limited to ascetics? We don’t think of every Christian as an anchorite.

Peace?

[svensson]

@mfbrandi I think when you get right down to it, most of the street-level believers of any faith are 'just plain folks'. They're grounded in the reality of holding jobs, raising kids, and figuring out what's for dinner. They're not involved in religious politics [theological or temporal] because their day to day lives keep them firmly grounded in the world of the possible. I know several Sikhs and Bahai'i that are very much like the Jains you describe, plus of course the local menu of Abrahamic faiths.

It's when money and power get involved that almost every believer's Achilles heel get exposed and they turn into doctrinaire jerks.

[Bill the barbarian]

4 hours ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

For the uninitiated, Jainism is like... nonviolent extremist Buddhism?

Militant Buddhism?

That Jain temple is sweet, evocative! I can see adventure in that pic.

17 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

I am sure you didn’t mean it that way, but this does make it sound like they are a bunch of weirdos.

I think Q is quite up on all that... I think they were using an elevator pitch description which will always fail under scrutiny. Me, I just don't know where to not joke but I will always try to make a joke that is nice (I am of the Red Skelton school of niceness in comedy) enough that all may laugh at it (or not if it sucks). I think my militant buddhist jape might do that it  being so incongruent.

 

Edited March 26, 2023 by Bill the barbarian

[mfbrandi]

3 hours ago, Bill the barbarian said:

Militant Buddhism?

Unfortunately, Buddhists are just like the rest of us, too.

Spoiler

We are all us, after all, and sometimes all Uz (in ZZ mode).

On a lighter note, do you remember the Goodness Gracious Me sketch about Buddhist pest control?

[Bill the barbarian]

1 minute ago, mfbrandi said:

Unfortunately, Buddhists are just like the rest of us, too.

 

For humour to work and be nice it must have truth to provide its teeth.

 

2 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

On a lighter note, do you remember the Goodness Gracious Me sketch about Buddhist pest control?

Nope

[svensson]

Switching gears a little bit, this interesting article just popped up on my feed...

"Eating Kosher in the Ancient World"

 

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/what-archaeology-tells-us-about-the-ancient-history-of-eating-kosher

[Bren]

3 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Unfortunately, Buddhists are just like the rest of us, too.

And not a recent thing. Japanese warrior monks could be quite violent and date back to the Heian period.

[Squaredeal Sten]

Not so inspiring as the various works of art above -  I have used these pictures to illustrate scenes in Prax:

A group of whirlvishes -   and a trail in  typical brushy terrain.

 

 

 

 

 

[svensson]

On 3/26/2023 at 4:43 PM, Bren said:

And not a recent thing. Japanese warrior monks could be quite violent and date back to the Heian period.

There's Buddhist v. Hindu v. Sikh violence today in India.

Something we all need to remember is that extreme belief [in anything, but in this case religion] and violence go hand in hand. Groups of Humans are not all that different from the monkey troops we are descended from... we divide the world in to Us [my people] and Them [whoever the Hell those people are over there] and it is our instinct to compete with and dominate them, just as they are driven to dominate us. The world is filled with finite resources and the more I have, the less you get.

Have your beliefs, but remember that the other guy has the right have his as well. And your vote counts for precisely the same amount that mine does.

Edited April 30, 2023 by svensson