Ancestors — Real & Imagined

[mfbrandi]

• SurEnslib raised the deep earth above the waters
  and sent the four snakes out to make the rivers and raise the sky.
  From her eggs hatched the plants and creatures of the world,
  and finally her people.°
   

49 minutes ago, soltakss said:

[B]oth Biselenslib and SurEnslib have ancestor-worshipping properties

It’s all good — I was just trying to get at whether you meant that the gods were variants of DF or the cults. Sounds like you mean the cults — I hope I am not putting words in your mouth. It was a grand god like SurEnslib her fine feathery self (a Bennu figure, there before the earth was dry and the sun shone) I thought unlike grumpy old dead bloke Daka Fal (but Emily loved him).

You made me wonder about ancestor worship. I used to think it was about raising the spirits of one’s literal ancestors, that one had to keep careful genealogical records, no raising uncles/aunts (save in cases of inbreeding), and illegitimacy throwing things off pretty quickly. And I thought of Daka Fal as literally “our” ancestor.

But the nominal head of the family tree is often not going to be literally an ancestor — for example, plants and animals are supposed to be the children of Ernalda and hatched from the eggs of SurEnslib; we could probably tell a story in which both were literally true (or one was right and the other wrong), but I take it we don’t have to and are not supposed to: the claim of descent from the god (or DF, come to that) is a bit of poetic fancy — so now I am wondering whether we are to contact heron-appropriate spirits or those of our literal ancestors. In the latter case, we can stick anyone at the (mythical) head of the family tree and it won’t make a lot of difference, right? We are tracing up, not down, and we will never get anywhere near our true first ancestor.

1 hour ago, soltakss said:

Trolls and Elves have ancestor-worship and Kyger Litor and Aldrya can be seen as aspects, or related to, Daka Fal.

If Daka Fal is — symbolically, at least — the ur-human, the original mortal, the “first man,” and the Uz the first humanoids ( creatures) — mythically, if not historically — then I can see the appeal of KL = DF (if there are no , who would surely get first dibs), but then do we promote DF to godhood, demote KL to mortality (whatever that means — everything dies), or just let the tension stand? (Or of course, it could just mean that KL worship can function like ancestor worship — like a DF cult.)

Isn’t the appeal of Daka Fal that s/he is not a god but just a regular Jo/anna? When we die and are judged, it is not by some snooty deity but by one of us — like being judged by the Unknown Soldier: just another one of the countless fallen cut down by those bastard gods. I like to think that no mortal-come-to-judgement looking into the mirror–face of Daka Fal sees anything beyond a gleam (of hope?) — not even the worst narcissist sees their own face reflected. I like to think that every god looking into the face of Daka Fal sees their own death and fears it. I like to think these things … but that doesn’t make them so.

So maybe:

• Daka Fal stands for the first mortal or the first humanoid mortal
  — is imagined to be our literal ancestor (but probably isn’t)
   
• SurEnslib is the divine ancestor we would have liked to have had
  — we imagine her nature says something about us as a people (but we likely kid ourselves)

Other putative divine  ancestors are available, of course. DF or divine, the “face” of the ancestor-worship cult is a symbolic ancestor, not a real one, whether or not the spirits we normally deal with are our literal ancestors or not. I don’t mean that DF and SurEnslib are not real in Glorantha, just that they are not really — or are only incidentally — the ancestors of their cultists. Whatever the ontological status of the gods, religion is a game of make-believe. (Gloranthan religion — no letters of complaint, please.)

Well, those are my idle, addled — doubtless soon to be junked — thoughts. Now you lot …

———————————————————————————

° CoR Prosopaedia, p. 116

[metcalph]

I think you are confusing the method used to worship those Gods (ie Ancestor worship) with ontological statements about status of those Gods (ie minor, major or great).  Pamaltela is worshipped as an Ancestor by the Men-and-a-half of Prax but that doesn't make him small.  SurEnslib could be a great deity for all anybody knows but the Darjiinians don't care to find out because the ancestral manner which they worship her in pisses off the Dara Happans. 

Edited September 24, 2023 by metcalph

[Darius West]

7 hours ago, metcalph said:

 Pamaltela is worshipped as an Ancestor by the Men-and-a-half of Prax but that doesn't make him small. 

I was thinking about that exact thing this morning.  There is a logical problem with this approach to worshipping Pamalt.  He isn't actually related to the Agimori if you read his lore, but rather adopted them.  Thus I would argue that the Praxian Agimori are not worshipping Pamalt directly, but contacting their powerful ancestors who worshipped Pamalt to act on their behalf and intercede between living Agimori and Pamalt. 

Of course this opens another interesting possibility... Feasibly such an ancestor could be embodied and act as a Priest of Pamalt who could initiate new members.  I can only suppose that this is impossible on the soil of dead Genert's land or it should have happened ?

Edited September 24, 2023 by Darius West

[metcalph]

13 minutes ago, Darius West said:

I was thinking about that exact thing this morning.  There is a logical problem with this approach to worshipping Pamalt.  He isn't actually related to the Agimori if you read his lore, but rather adopted them. 

He could have still fathered some Agimori lineages much as Zorak Zoran did for the Trolls.

[Joerg]

1 hour ago, Darius West said:

I was thinking about that exact thing this morning.  There is a logical problem with this approach to worshipping Pamalt.  He isn't actually related to the Agimori if you read his lore, but rather adopted them.  Thus I would argue that the Praxian Agimori are not worshipping Pamalt directly, but contacting their powerful ancestors who worshipped Pamalt to act on their behalf and intercede between living Agimori and Pamalt. 

Pamalt (and his coterie of gods from his necklace) created the Agitorani from clay and other ingredients much like Yelm and his family created Men (including Murharzarm the Emperor) from clay and other ingredients. Nobody claims that Murharzarm is anything other than the son of Yelm.

In Middle Sea Empire, Vimorn (one of the six Founders of Danmalastan) has three separate lineages of offspring (p..

Quote

After he was initiated to be an adult he married Kalonia, and they lived in the land of Hestanadarol in Vimornela. They had four sons and six daughters, and they were called the Hestanadaroli, or more commonly “The Seekers” or “The Scouts.” They were his first family of children.

These are the Viymorni mentioned in the Danmalastan texts in Revealed Mythology.

Quote

He also worked with all of his brothers when they created the race of the Erasko, and the five whose head he made were called the Pelans. They were his second family of children.

This sounds like a creation process similar to that of the Agitorani or the Dara Happan ancestors.

The third family is a bit metaphorical, but might be claiming ancestry for the other three Tribes of the Mountain People founding the Four Camps in the God Learner mythical maps:

Quote

Finally, he found three, all of whom were similar but unlike him, and they were called East, North and West. They were his third family of children.

All of these serve to claim ancestral connections.

 

1 hour ago, Darius West said:

Of course this opens another interesting possibility... Feasibly such an ancestor could be embodied and act as a Priest of Pamalt who could initiate new members.  I can only suppose that this is impossible on the soil of dead Genert's land or it should have happened ?

Rather than looking at the Men-and-a-Half of Prax, I would field the (normal-sized, which means still taller than their Malkioni neighbors) Pithdaran Agimori as a successful case in point. They retained quite a bit of their ways but also added the Jrusteli ways to their culture and spirituality, which may have included worship of deities as larger-than-life ancestors. Their expedition would have been led by priests of Pamalt who then became part of their adopted zzaburi or talar caste.

[mfbrandi]

10 hours ago, metcalph said:

Pamaltela is worshipped as an Ancestor by the Men-and-a-half of Prax but that doesn't make him small.

I certainly hope I didn’t anywhere suggest that the Darjiinians’ cult could not be an ancestor-worship cult along the lines of the DF practice or that this has any implication for the nature of the nominal ancestor-in-chief (“mother of us all”). Same with Pamalt and any other “mythical ancestor.”

(The origin of this thread was my asking in another thread whether someone was talking about cult or deity. But clearly, I didn’t express myself well. 😉)

[mfbrandi]

1 hour ago, Joerg said:

Yelm and his family created Men … from clay and other ingredients. Nobody claims that Murharzarm is anything other than the son of Yelm.

Nobody? Did anyone ask Rabbi Loew?

[scott-martin]

16 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

(but Emily loved him).

We will find it we will bind it we will stick it with glue glue glue.

IMG "Daka Fal" is really more an umbrella category for how we structure our true & faithful relations with some spirits of the dead . . . and since practically all the gods have died, with spirits of that scope as well. The procedure often involves letting the spirit sample your blood to confirm a lineage but clever people can make other kinds of compelling claims. (Sometimes just knowing the name and having a relic of the person is enough.) Either way, the goal is to get the spirit to recollect enough of itself and then recognize you as part of its posterity in the world worth intervening over. 

Blood is easy for a lot of spirits to recognize. But blood also makes them thirsty. And blood can be changed through adoption or other magically sufficient procedures. What I find useful is simply getting the spirit to feel sufficiently sentimental toward me and my predicament. You want to move them, remind them how precious life is and get them to help you out. On Earth we might call this something like the orpheus technique. If you can arouse enough passion, you get results even from people who weren't historically related to you.

Again in theory you can concoct a relationship, a spirit identity or both but in Glorantha this is usually facilitated through dreams and other spirit contacts ("seek your real grandfather") so in practice this looks a lot like simply asking Uncle Eddie for advice. The random ancestor roll reveals how much of the shade you recover and how well you overcome their innate thirst for embodiment. The archaic talars, for example, used this to explore their inheritance from the burtae. A more experimental approach then created the genealogies of the gods and even allowed for contacts with "hypothetical" entities like Tanian. 

I also suspect that the God Learners are the reason ancestral myths are described as being so fundamental to Gloranthan reality and yet so sketchily documented in the primary sources. Being able to infiltrate bloodlines played a huge part in their magical success. They probably wrote all this stuff down but it is one of the pieces that was successfully suppressed in the fall of the imperial age, erasing their records of comparative mortal origin while leaving the pantheon genealogies behind as an isolated relic of the system.

[Joerg]

9 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

I also suspect that the God Learners are the reason ancestral myths are described as being so fundamental to Gloranthan reality and yet so sketchily documented in the primary sources. Being able to infiltrate bloodlines played a huge part in their magical success. They probably wrote all this stuff down but it is one of the pieces that was successfully suppressed in the fall of the imperial age, erasing their records of comparative mortal origin while leaving the pantheon genealogies behind as an isolated relic of the system.

Sounds to me like we can read it almost uncoded in the Abiding Book, and with examples (the lineages of witnesses).

[scott-martin]

23 minutes ago, Joerg said:

Sounds to me like we can read it almost uncoded in the Abiding Book, and with examples (the lineages of witnesses).

If only I had a copy with the "foreign" lineages left in! Maybe if I put together enough of these ancestral accounts it will serve well enough.

Speaking of imagined ancestors I still think Daka Fal as "separator" (arranger) of the souls of the living from the souls of the dead is a mask or transformation of the Soul Arranger who we now call Larnste and that the mountains are a way to describe the territory of the dead ("god learner mythic maps"). The part that is new is that I am thinking we can identify these "stone grey deities" or "Law" givers with a rarely attested archaic malkion . . . the transregional yet local king of three corners plus the center. But this is unlikely to make me many new friends.

[scott-martin]

4 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Nobody? Did anyone ask Rabbi Loew?

Especially funny given the "grey" faction in the MOLAD being an unruly array of independents: trader princes, hermits, tricksters, sorcerers, Power Rune cults, dwarves . . . and Stone Men. Might as well be silver given the printing technologies available at the time.

[mfbrandi]

2 hours ago, scott-martin said:

The procedure often involves letting the spirit sample your blood to confirm a lineage but clever people can …

… drug their own blood to sweeten the deal. Get the cult spirits addicted to the interaction.°

Also, I cannot shake the image of all of an applicant’s blood being siphoned off into the aether (like something out of that other game, the unspeakable one), the dried husk collapsing to the floor, a “kerr-ching” sound, and a somewhat tenuous paper slip fluttering down on top of the corpse. When picked up and read, the slip says simply, “Approved.”

° Yes, I know DNA, blah, blah, blah.

[mfbrandi]

2 hours ago, scott-martin said:

But blood also makes them thirsty.

You see, @Joerg, the Nontrayans were just helping out by sampling the blood to aid the sorting — Daka Fal’s little helpers — but they were a bit too enthusiastic, and shit happened. And so tentatively we weave the strands? 😉

[scott-martin]

17 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

Also, I cannot shake the image of all of an applicant’s blood being siphoned off into the aether (like something out of that other game, the unspeakable one), the dried husk collapsing to the floor, a “kerr-ching” sound, and a somewhat tenuous paper slip fluttering down on top of the corpse. When picked up and read, the slip says simply, “Approved.”

The Tap is not the only technique known by reputation by the pious liturgists of this fallen era. They who traffick with demons outside the Man Rune pentagram of zzabur the wise gain horrible knowledge & conversation but at what price?


 

[Malin]

On 9/24/2023 at 2:07 AM, metcalph said:

SurEnslib could be a great deity for all anybody knows but the Darjiinians don't care to find out because the ancestral manner which they worship her in pisses off the Dara Happans. 

She did eat a Red Emperor... I love her. (had a Darjini lunar legion deserter so I needed to do a cult writeup some years back, sadly very defunct now)

[Jape_Vicho]

The way I see it:

Ancestor cult is about being able to enter the Underworld safely and maintaining a connection between the dead and living clansmen, which provides food and comfort to the dead, and guidance and cohesion to the living. Other than that, ancestor worship is very complex and has huge regional variations. 

As we know, for the Theyalans, ancestor worship revolves around 1) the unity of mankind though their common ancestor, Grandfather Mortal, 2) Daka Fal, the Jugde of the Dead, who is Grandfather Mortal once dead and 3) the local and specific ancestors, the dead clansmen and clanswomen.

Most cultures mantain the Judge of the Dead figure, and all worship their specific ancestors, but the "forefather/first man/being" varies greatly. The Balazarigs, for example, channel their ancestor worship through their (former) eponymous founder, Votank. If they think the Judge of the Dead is dead Votank or another being is anyone's guess, but I think it doesn't matter much. I think most Pelorians are similar, though they connect their founding ancestors to Yelm or Lodril, depending on the status of their culture. The Westerners are even more specific; their ancestor worship is centered on castes, subcastes and noble lineages.

The Manimati take a somewhat opposite approach. What I suspect is that SsurEnslib is basically a Middle Green Age entity, who preceded even (some) gods. SsurEnslib didn't create things in a classical sense, but separated into them because of the tendency to create new things that reigned in the Green Age. Somehow, the Manimati managed to mantain the memory and worship of that entity, and associated it to their land. SsurEnslib is "long gone", it stopped to exist at some point, but because Time didn't, and still doesn't affect her, her worshipers can still access her. The Manimati probably think of themselves as the chosen people of the Heron Goddess, the only ones that maintained their original lifestyle, while the other peoples have become corrupted.

The Vithelans follow a similar approach. Ebe/Iste is not just the ancestor of Men, but also of many other races. But when people (humans) take on his cult, what they are mostly doing is the same thing the Theyalans, Praxians, Pelorians, and Westerners do: secure their entrance into the afterlife and maintain a connection between Dead and Living.

EDIT: BTW, Grandfather Baboon is not a different entity to Grandfather Mortal, they are the same being, who was both Baboon and Man, as the two races hadn't been separated yet when he was struck by Death. Of course, Baboons might see it differently, and they are very free to do that.

Edited September 30, 2023 by Jape_Vicho

[kalidor]

Can Sartar be aproached as an Ancestors Cult?

[French Desperate WindChild]

15 minutes ago, kalidor said:

Can Sartar be aproached as an Ancestors Cult?

Why not

however there are very few living people who can claim sartar as an ancestor.. Argrath and … well is there someone else ?

 

seems to me easier to contact Sartar with Orlanth Rex subcult (in sartar land of course)

[scott-martin]

44 minutes ago, kalidor said:

Can Sartar be aproached as an Ancestors Cult?

If lineal descent is important to your relationship with Sartar than I suspect it would be difficult to approach Sartar in any other way.

Another thing is that people in the terminal third age IMG are discovering that these "genealogical" links are less a matter of proving your bloodline than demonstrating to the wyter that you're aligned with the founder's vision . . . a spiritual heir. One bit of MGF this opens up is that the wyter can be free to refuse someone with otherwise impeccable ancestral documentation if someone else makes a better competing argument. Families of choice are a real thing in magic, why not open that choice to the spirits themselves?

[mfbrandi]

A bit of Ancestry 101 here. (Adam Rutherford is author of How to Argue with a Racist (which is such a great title, I must round to reading it) and is a well-known media academic here in the UK.)

[soltakss]

On 10/1/2023 at 8:48 PM, kalidor said:

Can Sartar be aproached as an Ancestors Cult?

Yes, in fact members of the House of Sartar probably treated him as the head of an Ancestor cult.