Arkat Cult conflict with Illumination

[Zac]

I am just trying to wrap my head around some descriptions of the Arkat Cult from the Cult Compemdium.

Quote

An Arkat will never accept the use of chaotic magic. They never will deal fairly or honestly with any chaotic being or thing. Now that their Heroquesting abilities have been dispersed through all cults, they aim only to destroy chaos, and will not rest till they have done so.

And

Quote

The Arkat cult maintains a strict watch on itself and the rest of the world. As Illuminates, they can detect Illumination in others.

If they are Illuminated they should have lost their fear of Chaos. So why are they trying to destroy Chaos? Is it some form of false Illumination?

Edited August 27, 2023 by Zac
Typo

[Akhôrahil]

1 hour ago, Zac said:

If they are Illuminated they should have lost their fear of Chaos. So why are they trying to destroy Chaos? Is it some form of false Illumination?

You can - and probably should - still oppose Chaos as a Bad Thing.

[metcalph]

Their condemnation of chaos comes not from unthinking instinct but through a rational appreciation of the dangers.   Although they hate chaos, they hate Gbaji even more and focus their attentions of eliminating his worship.  However this leads to problems.  There is no widely accepted definition of who worships Gbaji and as a result the first solution they arrive at is the Arkati of the other cities are Gbajites (they can and do make exceptions).  The second is that they hate Gbaji so much and Chaos not that much (because of illumination, see) that a few Arkati find working with Chaos to use against servants of Gbaji to be morally acceptable.  

[Eff]

2 hours ago, Zac said:

I am just trying to wrap my head around some descriptions of the Arkat Cult from the Cult Compemdium.

And

If they are Illuminated they should have lost their fear of Chaos. So why are they trying to destroy Chaos? Is it some form of false Illumination?

The most consistent answer is that while they're liberated from any kind of automatic fear, that doesn't preclude an intellectualized hatred. 

[Akhôrahil]

9 minutes ago, Eff said:

The most consistent answer is that while they're liberated from any kind of automatic fear, that doesn't preclude an intellectualized hatred. 

Also compare Oddi the Keen, illuminated Storm Bull cultist, who still fights Chaos but dislikes that he can't bring on the same unreflecting fury any longer.

[Zac]

1 hour ago, Akhôrahil said:

Also compare Oddi the Keen, illuminated Storm Bull cultist, who still fights Chaos but dislikes that he can't bring on the same unreflecting fury any longer.

I was actually just reading the dialogue with him from The Cult Compendium today. 

"There is a connected matter,” Oddi added. “How shall I fight this battle today, feeling as I do? The hate has gone out of me, and I have no lust for war."

The interpretation I got from that dialogue was that he fought because his Lunar companion explains that this is what kings do for thier subjects. 

"Why you came to be here this day with this knowledge only the Spider can know, and you must take it up with her. But if you will remain King, then kingly you must be in the same way you are just now friendly with me. "

So Oddi fights but only because that is what he must do as king.

[Zac]

2 hours ago, Eff said:

The most consistent answer is that while they're liberated from any kind of automatic fear, that doesn't preclude an intellectualized hatred. 

But surely that is still "hatred" though? "Intellectualized" can be read as "rationalised" in this situation, no?

[Zac]

3 hours ago, metcalph said:

Although they hate chaos, they hate Gbaji even more and focus their attentions of eliminating his worship. 

I get what you all are saying but the Benefits of Illumination section I was looking at says:

"It makes the person of law free from automatic fear of chaos and the obsession to destroy it."

And, as the quotes about Oddi show, he finds a different reason to be fighting but he isn't driven by a fear or hatred of chaos but his duty as king. 

So looking at the points from the text:

• An Arkat will never accept the use of chaotic magic.

Just being sensible here unless you follow the Lunar Way. 🙂

• They never will deal fairly or honestly with any chaotic being or thing.

This seems to be edging towards non-Illuminated behaviour

• Now that their Heroquesting abilities have been dispersed through all cults, they aim only to destroy chaos, and will not rest till they have done so.

This seems directly at odds with one of the benefits of Illumination.

So either they are not actually Illuminated, it is some odd form of Akrkati Illumination that precludes losing the obsession to destroy or there is some other dynamic that is causing them to follow their goal of eliminating chaos. 

But what could that be?

The text I am quoting might be old and rewritten or re-interpreted. 

3 hours ago, metcalph said:

There is no widely accepted definition of who worships Gbaji and as a result the first solution they arrive at is the Arkati of the other cities are Gbajites (they can and do make exceptions). 

This is an interesting twist on things and also fits nicely with the dualistic nature of the Arkat/Nysolar conflict. 

[Richard S.]

Illumination means that your soul doesn't automatically recoil from the idea of Chaos. Unilluminated simply don't have a choice in how they react to chaos, it's ingrained into their being thanks to the gods war and cosmic compromise. Illuminates can choose for themselves whether or not chaos is evil, unbound by what the universe says is right.

[g33k]

2 hours ago, Zac said:

...

• They never will deal fairly or honestly with any chaotic being or thing.

This seems to be edging towards non-Illuminated behaviour

• Now that their Heroquesting abilities have been dispersed through all cults, they aim only to destroy chaos, and will not rest till they have done so.

This seems directly at odds with one of the benefits of Illumination.

So either they are not actually Illuminated, it is some odd form of Akrkati Illumination that precludes losing the obsession to destroy or there is some other dynamic that is causing them to follow their goal of eliminating chaos. 

...

It isn't "obsessive" to understand that Chaos is beyond understanding or prediction, and that any slight iota of Chaos may hold within itself -- or may spontaneously generate -- something that threatens the complete destruction of all Glorantha.

Is it "illuminated" to be OK with that?

[Ormi Phengaria]

8 hours ago, Zac said:

• An Arkat will never accept the use of chaotic magic.

Just being sensible here unless you follow the Lunar Way. 🙂

Nonetheless, if they do use accept the use of chaotic magic, the only consequences for such are purely within the cult, if at all, by the nature of Illumination.

8 hours ago, Zac said:

• They never will deal fairly or honestly with any chaotic being or thing.

This seems to be edging towards non-Illuminated behaviour

Quite the contrary. To deal with known chaos by deception and underhandedness requires a more intimate, maybe even sympathetic, knowledge of what it is.

8 hours ago, Zac said:

• Now that their Heroquesting abilities have been dispersed through all cults, they aim only to destroy chaos, and will not rest till they have done so.

This seems directly at odds with one of the benefits of Illumination.

It's at odds with the benefit of the Secret Knowledge as understood by the majority of those who listened to and were Illuminated by Rashoran or Nysalor. But, looked at another way, one can seize upon the Secret Knowledge as a weapon, pointed in either direction. You no longer instinctively fear your enemies— but mere instinct is not the origin of all enmity.

[metcalph]

10 hours ago, Zac said:

The text I am quoting might be old and rewritten or re-interpreted. 

I admit I am reinterpreting the old text to fit in what is known about Safelster today as opposed to when the text was written.  A key part in my observation was that the Arkati make a big deal about opposing Chaos yet they live in Ralios... which hardly has any major infestations (Karia has just woken up within the past decade or two whereas the Arkati have been around for a millenium).

A way of reconciling the absolutism of the Cults of Terror might be this.  The Arkati are following a branch of Neo-Platonism (Iamblichus IIRC) in which they substitute Henosis (mental unity with the One Mind that is central to other Malkioni wizards - mentioned in RQG p384 in learning new runes) with mental unity with the pagan gods.   The only Gods they avoid are the Lords of Terror hence their prohibition*.  It also gives other Malkioni schools a good reason to call the Arkati heretics when they tolerate worship of pagan gods within their own society.  But we have to wait for the Invisible God book...

*Setting Arkat the Devil aside who probably is even more complicated.

[Ali the Helering]

I believe the traditional answer you are looking for is "The sound of one hand, clapping".

One should never try to delineate the ineffable.  Always f*** it!

[mfbrandi]

12 hours ago, Zac said:

The interpretation I got from that dialogue was that he fought because his Lunar companion explains that this is what kings do for their subjects.

Oddi as Arjuna?

[Qizilbashwoman]

2 hours ago, metcalph said:

It also gives other Malkioni schools a good reason to call the Arkati heretics

tfw when your monad is a spider

[mfbrandi]

17 hours ago, Zac said:

If they are Illuminated they should have lost their fear of Chaos.

People try to counter this by focusing on “free from automatic fear of Chaos and the obsession to destroy it” (CoT, p. 86 — emphasis mine) and claim that their fear — or hatred, as it may be — is neither automatic nor irrational, so there is no cognitive dissonance. This, I think, is wrong.°

If we look instead at these bits of the Cults of Terror (“classic” edition) Nysalor cult description:

• Secret Knowledge – the illuminated one will know as truth that Chaos is, in itself, neither evil nor inimical. — p. 86
• Once a being has realized that there is no final difference between Chaos and Law, he may later make a similar but false parallel between his personal ethics and his personal desires°° — p. 87

… we will conclude not only that Chaos is neither evil nor inimical, but that it is not even different. That is why detect Chaos is bullshit — there is nothing to detect. It is not so much that illuminates are immune to detect Law/Chaos, but that they are counterexamples to the supposition that the world provides anything for such purported abilities to get a purchase on. “Nothing marks Chaos out from Cosmos” is written on our banner, right?

In short, the Arkati project is incoherent and they are all dangerous lunatics. As Arkat is the “inventor” of Zorak Zoran, it should perhaps come as no surprise that it is possible to be illuminated but driven over the edge by one’s illumination and to be engaged in a delusional fight against a foe indistinguishable from oneself. If the true Gloranthan fight is between the cold wind from the outside and the bright fire within, Uncle ZZ seems to embody both. IFWW is self-overcoming, but it is still a mistake. Stop gritting your teeth and just let go …

——————————————————————————————————————————
° Of course, every bit of Gloranthan lore can be read as either ironic or as from the pen of an imagined unreliable narrator, so even if coherent, my interpretation is not compulsory. Nor would I want it to be.

°° The “similar but false” here tells us that the no final difference between Chaos and Law bit is true, else it would be “similarly false.”

[Squaredeal Sten]

My own view of Illuminstion is stronger than my view of Arkat, but here it is:

Illumination is realizing the true nature if the world, it"s all a game.  This includes realizing that chaos is part of thu universe.  It also implies realizing that many munchkin dodges are possible including using chaos. 

There are varieties of illumination, one being Andrew L. Montgomery's view of draconic illumination.

That does not mean that the illuminate is suddenly stupid and unable to realize that chaos threatens the rest of the universe and all the he holds dear, so it had better be fought, kept far away,, controlled etc..  On this general principle, Arkat and Sedenya agree. Where they differ is on where they draw the line.

The Gloranthan character is unlike the player in that he or she can't get out of the game, can't just put the book away.

Having said this, there are many ways people can react to illumination and incorpoate it into their actions.  Arkat's is one way, Sedenya's is another. Argrath's is a third.   Your own is yet another. These reactions differ according to the illuminates' prior experiences, values, assumptions, associations etc..  Which do not go away upon illumination. 

Therefore Akat's behavior is not necessarily the behavior of all illuminates.  

 

 

 

Edited August 28, 2023 by Squaredeal Sten
The Gloranthan character... paragraph. Also of course fighting spell check.

[mfbrandi]

13 hours ago, Richard S. said:

Illuminates can choose for themselves whether or not chaos is evil, unbound by what the universe says is right.

Three different (purported) insights:

• Chaos is not evil
• The universe has not told me that Chaos is evil
• The universe has told me that Chaos is evil, but there is no reason to listen to the universe

It seems pretty clear — “the illuminated one will know as truth that Chaos is, in itself, neither evil nor inimical” — that the riddlers’ take on Chaos is the first.

If the talking universe is just a metaphor, how do we cash it out?

Two conceptions of religious morality (owed to our blessed Auntie L):

• God says it is evil because it is evil
• It is evil because God says it is evil

In the first, God has perfect knowledge and is perfectly honest and open — God is a convenient authority, but we could figure it out for ourselves given time and sufficient brainpower. In the second, there is nothing to know beyond God’s word — God has spoken and there is an end to it; God is not answerable to any discoverable “moral facts” in the universe; God — if you like — is the moral facts of the universe.

One kind of worry would be: it seems impossible to decipher morals from the Cosmos, no matter how hard we look; either God has stopped speaking to us or we have lost faith in what She says; we enter crisis, and we feel we must just pick some morality, even if we cannot ground it in anything; we fear that even though a grounded morality is impossible, bad faith is a very real danger (we will pick what serves us and tell ourselves it is right). But have we any reason to think that illumination will get us into that fix?

[Malin]

1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

Once a being has realized that there is no final difference between Chaos and Law, he may later make a similar but false parallel between his personal ethics and his personal desires°°

And that might prove to be an insight into the Arkati; they have substituted their personal desires for their personal ethics. They might no longer fear the intrinsical alienness of chaos, but they assume that the personal desires they held before (eradicate chaos) are the one true answer to the universe now that they can freely see the truth.

Being illuminated does not mean wisdom, only freedom from instinctual reactions.

[scott-martin]

42 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

driven over the edge by one’s illumination

Or even by that most itchy of factors, "someone else's" illumination. If ZZ is a cult cultivated to both carry Arkat illumination and be bonkers berserk then we blame the architect or ARKATect as it were. That's his imposed vision that pushed them over the edge. By the time they wake up it's too late. They're in his dream until they find their way out. Of course ZZ with third eye open can break away from that role any time they like, but for most that means breaking away from ZZ and becoming someone else . . . maybe back up from the cliff, maybe driven even further out. In the meantime, the imposed vision is resonant enough that they hang around.

There are several cults like this. Gerlant and Talor remained within the parent cult's illuminated orbit. Looking back to old texts where "Argat" is literally crossed out and "Humakt" penned in above it, I think the sword cult cut its way out of bondage and is its own free entity now. There was one other but it slips my mind right now . . . too much going on and the Autarchy had all kinds of strange ways erased from the records we have.

Also amongst modern adherents the endless sectarianism demonstrates that the definition of "chaos" and the limits of how we (are allowed to) choose to interact with it are open to interpretation. The cult architects were so driven by hatred of what they called "chaos" that that they wrote that requirement into the cult framework . . . but the nature of illumination means that every illuminated initiate is absolutely and horribly free to draw that line wherever their vision decides, even redefine it to the point that their co-cultists cry foul.

If you like spending your illuminated life standing watch over the world in a grim crusade, that's cool. You're still in the Arkat cult. If you get bored with that, I don't recall seeing supernatural reprisal so you're absolutely and horribly free to go do something else. The biggest obstacle comes from your former buddies who are a strange and touchy bunch with powers like yours. I will say that for a lot of illuminated people, "never say never" is a pretty smart way to live. You might find yourself dealing honestly with some chaotic thing for reasons of your own, in which case either the rule is not inflexible or the thing isn't as chaotic as your buddies told you it was. Honi soit qui mal y pense.

[mfbrandi]

4 minutes ago, Malin said:

an insight into the Arkati; they … assume that the[ir] personal desires … are the one true answer

In other words, they are the dark side they claim to be fighting. Perhaps they do only fight each other and then succumb to utuma.

[French Desperate WindChild]

19 hours ago, Zac said:

If they are Illuminated they should have lost their fear of Chaos. So why are they trying to destroy Chaos? Is it some form of false Illumination?

illumination, as I understand it, frees you from the instinctive, or non reasoned feelings.Gloranthan hate/fear chaos because their instinct, their runes, "tell" them chaos is dangerous.

once illuminated, that doesn't mean you welcome chaos. That just means (still, my opinion) that you understand something, differently. Your eyes are now open, beyond the smog of your instinct, your culture, the ordinary sense.

Your reason, and your teachers if you are part of any school - lunar, arkati, etc... - demonstate what Chaos is (and other things). Of course Arkati would say Lunar demonstration is wrong, false, etc... and Lunars would say that Arkati demonstration is wrong, false.

the key point is logic (with mistakes from other schools than yours) drives you now.

then the discussion about Gbadji and Arkat makes more sense: Arkat is Gabdji for those who consider its demonstration with deliberate mistake = a lie, and vice versa.

 

[Zac]

Wow. Lots of great comments. Lots to think about.

I think that the idea of illumination stopping the automatic response to chaos or law is an important one. As is the idea of someone being Illuminated but still being barking mad and acting irrationally. 

Thanks for all the comments everyone

[mfbrandi]

1 hour ago, scott-martin said:

Also amongst modern adherents the endless sectarianism demonstrates that the definition of “chaos” and the limits of how we (are allowed to) choose to interact with it are open to interpretation. The cult architects were so driven by hatred of what they called “chaos” that that they wrote that requirement into the cult framework … but the nature of illumination means that every illuminated initiate is absolutely and horribly free to draw that line wherever their vision decides, even redefine it to the point that their co-cultists cry foul.

And yet isn’t this again to equate the dark side of illumination with the essence of illumination? I have never seen what the dark side had to do with illumination, at all.

• No difference between Law and Chaos, therefore no difference between what I want and what I am permitted

Isn’t this explicitly called out as a bad argument, a false parallel? And it is surely not the case that everyone who believes that there is no difference between what they want and what they are permitted to have — between their desires and their deserts — is an illuminate, someone with an insight into the relation between Law/Cosmos and Chaos/the Void … or an insight into anything much, at all.

But Glorantha seems to be awash with munchkin illuminates. Why is this? On one level, the game designers having chosen to give illuminates “superpowers,” it was an easy way to give power to the delusional, world-wrecking sociopaths and narcissists: make them illuminates, too, and have them play Pokémon with cult secrets. But this seems like a shallow answer.

Another answer is that we only see the munchkins; the illuminates leading the quiet life — the Master Zhuangs? — are invisible. If they don’t blow anything up, we don’t notice them. But that doesn’t seem like the whole answer.

I am tempted by the idea that those who see danger in illumination are those who are terrified by the death of God, by the loss of faith, by all that is solid melting into air: if this “truth” is gone, then we are kites without strings, and nothing will prevent us plummeting into the moral abyss or being lost to the wind. “Chaos is not evil” stands in for “God is dead” — if that is true, how will we ever tell right from wrong? I am tempted by it, but it makes me feel like a patronising atheist — editorialising over crises I have never had. You cannot bootstrap morality, and there is no solid foundation to build it on, but what of it? These things were never possible.

[Zac]

25 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

Another answer is that we only see the munchkins; the illuminates leading the quiet life — the Master Zhuangs? — are invisible. If they don’t blow anything up, we don’t notice them. But that doesn’t seem like the whole answer.

Or maybe the "Illuminates" that are seen are the ones that have been driven crazy by using their illumination to justify irresponsible and/or horrific behaviour?

Maybe Illumination is just the first step and you need to pass through that first stage and not turn into a psychopath to be truly Illuminated?