Verithurus/Verithurusa

[DrGoth]

Re-reading the guide and the sourcebook I was struck by the distinction between Verithurus(male) and Verithurusa(female). See, for example guide p. 114 and sourcebook p96.

I know there has been discussion of this on this forum before, for example, that these are male and female aspects of the same deity, that 'son' is used very loosely in the copper tablets and even that the Red Goddess was made from parts of several dead deities, not one.  But there are still some things about this that interest me.

The sourcebook, on. p96, has the female Verithurusa in the Solar pantheon.  The Red Goddess claims to be Verithurusa, so that makes sense in itself.  But the Gods Wall definitively shows Verithurus as male.  There are more aspects to the issue, if we step outside canon to the GRoY.  Verithurus is identified there as the overseer of Mernita.  But in the description of the reign of Lukarius, Sedenya is identified as the Goddess of Mernita.  This could be interpreted as:

a) Verithurus/Verithurusa has/had both male and female aspects

b) Sedenya supplanted Verithurus as the deity of Mernita

c) Verithurusa was always female and the Dara Happans just couldn't cope with a female planet so labelled it as male

There's probably other explanations as well.

There is one question that I really don't know how to answer though.  The God's Wall is, as I understand it, the rock on which Dara Happan religious understanding is built.  It shows Verithurus.  But the sourcebook shows Verithurusa, which implies that is the accepted interpretation as of 1625. Is the contemporary (ie 1625) Dara Happan understanding that the Gods wall is wrong, and Verithurusa is female or that the deity has male and female aspects?  

Either answer is interesting to me. Because of what it says about how thoroughly the Lunars have penetrated Yelmic tradition.  There is no way, at least to my understanding, that the pre-Lunar Yelmic religion would have tolerated either answer.  They appear to me to be so patriarchal that, as shown in the guide, as far as they were concerned, all Yelm's sons where sons.  None of them were 'sons'.

So what is the explanation given in Dara Happa in 1625 as to the conflict between the God's Wall and the acceptance of Verithurusa? And what does that tell us about Lunar influence over Yelmic religion?

Or am I wrong, and the pre-Lunar Dara Happans were quite comfortable with a deity with both male and female aspects? I find this hard to believe, but I could be wrong.

As an aside, I think that if you accept a) or c) above, then Red Goddess is pretty clearly wholly or largely the child of Yelm who was the deity of Mernita.  That of course makes her the daughter of Dendara, with all the interesting things that then involves.

[scott-martin]

1 hour ago, DrGoth said:

There is one question that I really don't know how to answer though.  The God's Wall is, as I understand it, the rock on which Dara Happan religious understanding is built.  It shows Verithurus.  But the sourcebook shows Verithurusa, which implies that is the accepted interpretation as of 1625. Is the contemporary (ie 1625) Dara Happan understanding that the Gods wall is wrong, and Verithurusa is female or that the deity has male and female aspects?  

Love it. The short response to this one is that the Wall is considered infallible divine revelation but individual interpreters' understanding of it is not. Not even the authority of Plentonius survived unchallenged for a century before people found his identifications insufficient. This is the mechanism through which their civilization maintains fidelity to unchanging ancient forms while the inner sense of what those forms mean and how we interact with them evolves to fit current concerns.

The slightly longer response to your current concern in particular revolves around the sheer number of entities depicted being too large for most people to hold easily in their head at once. Figures get ignored. After periods of development (investigation, experimentation, conflict, "change") some figures that were once popular objects of veneration become exhausted or more actively suppressed. They're still self evident on the Wall but nobody talks about them any more. Their cults recede and the tour guides come up with pat segues to get themselves through figures they prefer not to talk about or no longer really understand. The Moon among others is built out of these "dormant" figures and a new interpretation emerges. It's how new light gets in, with some figures getting pushed to the margins, others pushed together and some rising to the center of life. However, because continuity of knowledge is limited where these particular figures are concerned, many of the details come as a shock or would require special pleading if not backed up by a competing and immanent revelation. But the Wall lecture used in the Guide and other places is still largely the literary text that prevailed in the early third century, nearly a millennium before the lunar revolution. And there's only so much you can do with footnotes when Plentonius himself didn't really know or preferred not to say. He might not have wanted to think about a girl in pants or a boy in a skirt, maybe he didn't even have access to our word for "daughter" and so had to engage in severe gymnastics to get through the tour.

The shortest answer is that if you really want to know, you can always ask the goddess and she'll tell you. This is how she differs from the sun that will not talk to us.

[Nick Brooke]

How do you deal with Orlanth being Vinga? Same difference.

[jajagappa]

6 hours ago, DrGoth said:

Verithurus/Verithurusa has/had both male and female aspects

Verithurus(us/a) is the deity of Innocence, i.e. pre-awareness of gender distinction. The DH could only conceive of this being as male (being post-awareness), the Lunars depict as female (also from post-awareness standpoint). Neither can get back to the days of Innocence (and indeed the Gods Wall was made after Innocence was lost), so the deity is never properly represented.

[Eff]

6 hours ago, DrGoth said:

Re-reading the guide and the sourcebook I was struck by the distinction between Verithurus(male) and Verithurusa(female). See, for example guide p. 114 and sourcebook p96.

I know there has been discussion of this on this forum before, for example, that these are male and female aspects of the same deity, that 'son' is used very loosely in the copper tablets and even that the Red Goddess was made from parts of several dead deities, not one.  But there are still some things about this that interest me.

The sourcebook, on. p96, has the female Verithurusa in the Solar pantheon.  The Red Goddess claims to be Verithurusa, so that makes sense in itself.  But the Gods Wall definitively shows Verithurus as male.  There are more aspects to the issue, if we step outside canon to the GRoY.  Verithurus is identified there as the overseer of Mernita.  But in the description of the reign of Lukarius, Sedenya is identified as the Goddess of Mernita.  This could be interpreted as:

a) Verithurus/Verithurusa has/had both male and female aspects

b) Sedenya supplanted Verithurus as the deity of Mernita

c) Verithurusa was always female and the Dara Happans just couldn't cope with a female planet so labelled it as male

There's probably other explanations as well.

There is one question that I really don't know how to answer though.  The God's Wall is, as I understand it, the rock on which Dara Happan religious understanding is built.  It shows Verithurus.  But the sourcebook shows Verithurusa, which implies that is the accepted interpretation as of 1625. Is the contemporary (ie 1625) Dara Happan understanding that the Gods wall is wrong, and Verithurusa is female or that the deity has male and female aspects?  

Either answer is interesting to me. Because of what it says about how thoroughly the Lunars have penetrated Yelmic tradition.  There is no way, at least to my understanding, that the pre-Lunar Yelmic religion would have tolerated either answer.  They appear to me to be so patriarchal that, as shown in the guide, as far as they were concerned, all Yelm's sons where sons.  None of them were 'sons'.

So what is the explanation given in Dara Happa in 1625 as to the conflict between the God's Wall and the acceptance of Verithurusa? And what does that tell us about Lunar influence over Yelmic religion?

Or am I wrong, and the pre-Lunar Dara Happans were quite comfortable with a deity with both male and female aspects? I find this hard to believe, but I could be wrong.

As an aside, I think that if you accept a) or c) above, then Red Goddess is pretty clearly wholly or largely the child of Yelm who was the deity of Mernita.  That of course makes her the daughter of Dendara, with all the interesting things that then involves.

Some thoughts here: 

First of all, a general methodological comment. With the Glorious Reascent (never mind the canonicity thing, the Guide and Sourcebook all depend on it) and the Stafford Library books that follow it, we have a historicized narrative- The GR is a nationalistic document like the Enuma Elish, providing a mythological understanding for the victory of Khordavu over the horse emperors, the rejection of the horse culture, the supremacy of the three cities along the Oslira over the other urban settlements and the peasants, and the primacy of Raibanth within the trio. But as a document, it's also intended to be read as if it were made like the Enuma Elish or the Prose Edda, stitching together other sources into a narrative but leaving some of the sewing visible and other edges still ragged. 

And the Gods Wall is, within that imagination, a source that demands interpretation but which we are led to understand has always been interpreted wrongly or incompletely, most succinctly through the millennium-long game of Where's Wally Where's Humakt that ended in an admission of defeat- the Gods Wall doesn't have Humakt on it, so it doesn't have every real or authentic god on it. 

So we should keep in mind that the Gods Wall is a nexus of doublethink- it both represents the correct order of creation and does not represent it, and the intellectual environment of Dara Happa and the Pelorian cultural sphere will be aware of this. We can assume a great deal of mental flexibility about the Gods Wall, (or perhaps the reaction of Poe scholars if you bring up the symbolism of the orangutan in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue"- "we don't talk about the Gods Wall".) This is one line of attack on this situation- Dara Happan intellectuals can reconcile just about anything. 

Another line of attack is to look at the Glorious Reascent closely. In the myth of Yelm's wedding contest, Verithurusa appears as one of the defeated participants. So we can infer that there's some pre-Lunar mythological presence of an entity named "Verithurusa". There is also a statement in the same section that Yelm is "not part of all males". Which also offers some mythological presence for entities that are neither male nor female, and entities which are bearded but not male, in Dara Happan mythology. Which makes matters much simpler- however Dara Happans process this statement about Yelm, this can be applied to any identification of Verithurusa with Verithurus. 

A third line of attack is to look at the imaginary linguistics of the Dara Happan writing system- "Verithurus" looks like a masculine name, with a masculine -us ending, but it's really got a null ending, which is only questionably masculine, because the feminine form is "Verithurusa" and not "Verithura". So whatever fine distinction exists between -us/os/as, um/om/am, (silent), and a/ya/ia as grammatical markers of gender, we can attribute to that distinction as many soporific arguments between peevish Yuthuppan scribes as we find necessary. 

A fourth line is to look at the specifically Dara Happan mythology (although Life of Sedenya shouldn't be neglected as a counterpoint). The Verithurus planet descends into the underworld and doesn't come back. There is no Verithurus after this point, and there's a figure "Jernedeus" that seems to stand in for the original Verithurus in parts of the Glorious Reascent. Verithurus descended into the monstrously feminine world, and so it would not be out of keeping with Dara Happan misogyny as a motif for them to understand this contact with femininity as causing a gender change in the fallen god, now goddess. (Of course, going back to Life of Sedenya, it seems that the Red Goddess would say that she was always a she, but we're not talking about her and her postmodernist ways, now are we, etc.)

There's a fifth line of attack here, which is quite simply- Dara Happans are, in the precanonical texts, straightforwardly wrong. Their insistence on a perfectly static mythological world where nothing changed is directly contradicted by the Glorious Reascent and Entekosiad. Maybe Dara Happans, after a long day out on the estate wishing they had more peons and slaves to brutally beat and maim, slink back into the villa, put a blanket over their head in a room that gets absolutely no moonlight whatsoever, and quietly, guiltily, misgender the Red Goddess. 

[metcalph]

A simple answer: Plentonius, interpreting the Gods Wall several thousand years after it was made, was misogynist and could not cope with a female daughter of Yelm.  So Verithurusa had to become male.  

But I daresay people prefer more complex narratives.

[DrGoth]

Thanks all.

I think there are some areas open to interpretation. Which is great. One of the things I love about Glorantha is that we have things like this, where not everything is cut and dried. I think that would be terribly limiting.  In the real world there aren't definitive answers to everything. Why should Glorantha be any different? I'd even make an argument that it should be less so in Glorantha. Not because it's fictional but because it's magic.

The following is my speculation and not meant to be definitive. YGWV

Pre the Red Goddess, and probably going back into the first age, Yelmic religion/Dara Happa regarded Verithurus as male. That's clearly the depiction on the God's Wall. That's saying nothing about what Verithurus actually was in the God's Age, just what the Yelmic interpretation was, post Dawn, Pre-Lunar.  It fits with the patriarchal (really, misogynistic) bent of the Solar religion.  They would have been quite comfortable to say "All the planets under Yelm were male".  That's not saying anything about what the author of the copper tablets meant.   Just how the Dara Happans interpreted them, backed up the God's Wall.

Then along comes the Red Goddess who says "I'm Sedenya. And Verithurusa as well.  Mernita? That was always me being the deity of that city. Look, I'm there in your myths. Cope."  We're always reminded (correctly) that there isn't a separate Yelmic religion in the Lunar Empire. It's integrated.  So they've accepted what the Goddess says - willingly or not.  I'm sure it helps that the Red Goddess is a child of Yelm.  

So now when they go look at the God's Wall, what sort of mental gymnastics do they do?  I'm sure it varies. Some would probably go "Well, the God's Wall isn't quite right. That's the Goddess there. Weren't they stupid to draw her as a man?"  Others would go "The Goddess is ever changing. Of course she could be a man sometimes.  Weren't they limited to think that's all she was?"  I'm sure some try very hard not to think about it.  Others "Gods wall, smods wall. I just listen to the Goddess". And others will go "I'm sure Yelm will reveal just what all this means."

But all of that shows that the Yelmic religion has changed (and isn't that what the Red Goddess does?). The Lunar religion has attacked its very foundations and it will likely never be the same again. And I have to say I'm in favour of anything that undermines the Yelmic smug, and very limited, view of the world.

As to what really happened in the God Time. Well, I have my own views on that, too.  But this isn't the thread for that.

[soltakss]

On 5/16/2023 at 6:20 PM, Nick Brooke said:

How do you deal with Orlanth being Vinga?

Some people's heads explode.

[mfbrandi]

1 hour ago, soltakss said:

Some people's heads explode.

Best film review title: Scanners writhe in pain. (Budrys riffs on Linebarger.)

[RHW]

4 hours ago, soltakss said:

Some people's heads explode.

That's pretty much expected when you tick off a Vinga Thunderous Priestess.

[Leingod]

On 5/17/2023 at 5:57 AM, DrGoth said:

But all of that shows that the Yelmic religion has changed (and isn't that what the Red Goddess does?). The Lunar religion has attacked its very foundations and it will likely never be the same again. And I have to say I'm in favour of anything that undermines the Yelmic smug, and very limited, view of the world.

Thing is, as @Eff said before, "Dara Happan intellectuals can reconcile just about anything." They're a lot like the imperial Chinese literati that way, in that they can contrive some tortured interpretation by which any novelty or innovation we want to or have to support is really an ancient thing that has merely been brought back after all these years to bring us back to the original purity of ancient times. No matter how much Dara Happan religion changes, they'll never admit to it, and they'll always find some way of proving that it was actually something ancient that was just hidden from them (which is probably a big part of why they were able to accept the Red Goddess at all; once she proved that she was always there, there was nothing further to discuss).

[DrGoth]

11 hours ago, Leingod said:

Thing is, as @Eff said before, "Dara Happan intellectuals can reconcile just about anything." They're a lot like the imperial Chinese literati that way, in that they can contrive some tortured interpretation by which any novelty or innovation we want to or have to support is really an ancient thing that has merely been brought back after all these years to bring us back to the original purity of ancient times. No matter how much Dara Happan religion changes, they'll never admit to it, and they'll always find some way of proving that it was actually something ancient that was just hidden from them (which is probably a big part of why they were able to accept the Red Goddess at all; once she proved that she was always there, there was nothing further to discuss).

Some day they'll break, though, some day....

Wanders off muttering about the stories of the Celestial Court just before the chaos hordes exploded the Spike...

[Eff]

17 hours ago, Leingod said:

Thing is, as @Eff said before, "Dara Happan intellectuals can reconcile just about anything." They're a lot like the imperial Chinese literati that way, in that they can contrive some tortured interpretation by which any novelty or innovation we want to or have to support is really an ancient thing that has merely been brought back after all these years to bring us back to the original purity of ancient times. No matter how much Dara Happan religion changes, they'll never admit to it, and they'll always find some way of proving that it was actually something ancient that was just hidden from them (which is probably a big part of why they were able to accept the Red Goddess at all; once she proved that she was always there, there was nothing further to discuss).

To diverge just slightly, the historical timeline of the spread of the pre-Moon and early post-Moon "Lunar Way" is also fairly unclear. There are seven years between the downfall of the Carmanian Empire and the rise of the Red Moon, and a further three before the Red Emperor becomes sole emperor of Dara Happa. It's entirely possible that the river valleys weren't eager to adopt the teachings of Living Goddess Teelo Imara and Lunar religious dominion took hold gradually there and more quickly in the flatlands, Pelanda, etc.